August 2009

This little bit of false equivalency is beginning to pop up more and more frequently: "The bad behavior isn't unique to health care opponents or right-wing activists. Liberal anti-war group Code Pink and animal rights group PETA are both known for their rowdy demonstrations. Code Pink supporters are regularly removed from Capitol Hill for disrupting key congressional hearings."

I'm no fan of Code Pink (or PETA, but lets leave them aside for the moment) but there's a major difference between their disruptive activity and the ones staged by the health creeps and tea baggers. Code Pink, and other antiwar protestors, stomp and yell to draw attention to their cause because they have been deliberately shut out of the conversation otherwise. The health creeps are stomping and yelling at events they've been invited to, at which they are given an opportunity to present their case rationally if they would like.

This may be my magazine journalism swan song. From this weekend's New York Times Magazine, While My Guitar Gently Beeps, a behind-the-scenes look at The Beatles: Rock Band that was seven-months in the making and, among its many other pleasures, afforded me the opportunity to meet one of the greatest songwriters of all time and someone I wanted to be when I was 10 years old.

Ringo Starr.

I'll warn you that it kind of goes on forever (cover stories, ahem, will do that) so if you can wait and read it in the print magazine (where it also looks terrific), you're probably better off doing so. But online you'll also find this video we shot of the excellent Beatles tribute band Bubble learning how to play the game � and nailing it on the first try. (You can't quite tell, but the drummer started on expert and scored a 93%. Once he figured out which pad correlated to which drum on Ringo's kit, I don't think he even looked at the screen.)

Update: I'm going to be discussing this tomorrow morning on The Takeaway and Saturday night on The New York Times Close Up.

If you came here looking for this week's anti-caption contest, or anything else really, perhaps I could have your attention for a brief announcement instead. For the entire seven years that I've been writing this blog I have been a freelancer, working mostly out of my home. That gave me not only the opportunity for blogging, but also the motive. I'd read something in the news, have something terribly clever and interesting to say about it, and nobody around to say it to.

About three months ago, I banged out one of those observations in the form of a dialogue with Michael Steele about gay marriage. Shortly after that I got an e-mail from someone at The Daily Show saying they liked it and would I consider applying for an open writing position. Fast-forward through several rounds of hoop-jumping to last week when I was officially offered, and accepted, the position. I start next month.

What that means for you? Well it's a poor reward for the blog that got me the job, but the truth is that I seriously doubt I'll have much time for updating. And I'll have another outlet for my observations about the news. I've already mentioned that I'd been getting a bit burned out on blogging anyway, so odds are this blog will go largely dormant, though I won't let it go completely dark. I'll be damned if this blog dies before Bil Keane does.

David Marc Fischer, better known to you and me as loyal reader and anti-captioner David F, has died unexpectedly of leukemia at the age of....

Well, I don't know how old he was, or much else about him at all. It's one of the odd pleasures of blogging that we can form real connections to one another without ever learning the things that in a pre-Internet world would be so basic. I do know that David had a clever wit, which he displayed as the proprietor of Blog About Town, where he kept meticulous track of both the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest and the Anti-Caption Contest. It was based on that that I invited him a couple of times to be a guest blogger, in which capacity he produced, with the help of Deborah, several altered Bil Keane cartoons, of which the first is still my favorite.

Emdashes has a bit more about David and his interests. Anyone else who knew him is encouraged to leave their thoughts in the comments.

Update: Deborah points out that David did win the anti-caption contest once, and was rightly proud of his joke.

10:40 AM