Ted also had this — is it a dig? A snark? I’m not sure what to call it, except maybe accurate — jem: when introducing comedian Jamie Lee, he said, “She was a finalist on Last Comic Standing … which you don’t know about, because you’re hipster trash like me and you don’t own a TV.” And it’s true.

So please enjoy a portion of his cover of the Brenton Wood Song “Gimme Little Sign” from Hot Tub.

And please enjoy this gratuitous picture of Ted with a Brokelyn shirt, which he said he was wearing all day but had to take it off before the show so he could “shower” or whatever. At which point we ripped the shirt away from him and told him never to besmirch our brand with “cleanliness” again. Kidding!

You would get a free shirt too if you wrote "Timorous Me."

With comedian Dave Hill on the left and host Jody Avirgan of WNYC (off screen), answering a question from Hill, “What is your least favorite time of week?”

Answering a question about whether he’s afraid of turbulence on a flight, and talking a little about his upcoming trip to Russia to promote Page One.

On why Twitter can drive him crazy, why anti-sports elitism is bullshit and making a prediction for the Super Bowl.

“It’s fucking Giants, all the way!”

Also, I talked to Carr afterward and we were interviewed by a strange man with a squirrel puppet and a video camera. As such:

After that, we were talking shop for a minute, when Carr grabbed my arm, twisted it toward his wife and said “Yeah, but this guy’s hardcore. Look at his tattoo.”

He said they use a different text to indicate the end of a story at the Times now, but “I like that one better.”

I’ve had worse evenings.

McCain realizes campaigning can sometimes be a real b word.

(Island Packet, Nov. 16, 2007) The question had a cadence and a sharp alliteration that sliced through the yadda-yadda-yadda about Social Security and health care that dominated Sen. John McCain’s campaign stop on Hilton Head Island on Monday.

With news cameras rolling, Wexford resident Linda Burke, prim in a neck scarf and pulled-back hair, leaned forward out of the crowd and asked plainly and emphatically: “How do we beat the bitch?”

That word, henceforth called the “B-Bomb,” referred to Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner who stirs up vituperative feelings deep in the gut of many Republicans.

It turned into the B-Bomb heard ’round the world.

Burke’s question — and McCain’s reaction — has caught fire with political wonks across the nation, appearing on cable news and turning into the issue du jour for liberal commentators. The blogosphere, that shadowy zone where even the most minuscule thing a candidate says is recorded, dissected, criticized and resent into the digital ether, is having a field day with it.

CNN’s Rick Sanchez, unleashing his inner feminist, did an entire segment on it, asking if the incident would finish McCain’s presidential hopes. For whatever reason, he sought Whoopi Goldberg’s opinion on it, too.

On Thursday, Inside Edition called The Island Packet asking for a photograph of Burke. YouTube videos of the incident have been viewed more than 900,000 times.

In short, the McCain campaign is getting B-slapped by the Hilton Head incident.

Here’s what happened: After Burke’s question at Trinity Restaurant and Bar, the room full of supporters erupted in hearty laughter and McCain squirmed, blinked and asked, “Can I get the translation?” before letting a small smile slip out.

Here’s the part causing all the ruckus: McCain, wiping sweat from his brow and trying to bring the crowd back around, said, “But that’s an excellent question,” before launching into a comment about a recent poll showing he’s the only Republican who can beat Clinton in the general election.

For liberal bloggers and commentators, not chastising the use of the B-Bomb and calling it an “excellent question” was a classless move. And in front of McCain’s 95-year old mother, even!

“It hit YouTube and really it caught fire on the Internet as an example of John McCain’s style, and unfortunately his lack of tact in this case,” said Steve Benen, editor of the popular liberal blog The Carpetbagger Report (www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com), which posted a video of the incident Tuesday. “I think it really reflects poorly on Senator McCain.”

Benen and other bloggers point to an incident a few days ago when McCain rebuffed his own mother’s comments about Mormonism on national television, but let the B-Bomb fall untouched.

For Burke, however, national exposure isn’t her only experience amplifying her feelings about the former first lady.

When Clinton moved to New York and ran for Senate, appearing in a parade outside Burke’s former home on 68th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City, she stuck a megaphone out her window and yelled “GO HOME!.”

“I’m terrified of her,” Burke said in an interview after Monday’s event. For the record, she’s still undecided, but leaning toward Rudy Giuliani.

Clinton’s campaign declined comment for this story, but Republicans say the incident is getting distorted. McCain said at the event: “I respect Sen. Clinton, I respect anyone who gets the nomination of the Democrat Party.”

McCain’s South Carolina campaign spokesman B.J. Boling said CNN’s Sanchez in particular was trafficking in “hyper-sensationalism.”

“His dramatics on what happened on Hilton Head not only reflect poorly on him but on CNN as a whole,” Boling said. “And if Mr. Sanchez had done the responsible thing as a journalist and actually paid attention to this race he would know that Sen. McCain has the utmost respect for Sen. Clinton and Mr. McCain has mentioned that respect time and time again on the campaign trail.”

Indeed, the two are often seen as congenial Senate cohorts, working together on issues such as climate change and Iraq. In a trip through Estonia in 2004, Clinton reportedly challenged McCain to a vodka-drinking contest.

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint criticized the use of the B-Bomb, but had no comment on McCain’s handling of it, spokesman Wesley Denton said.

“He just thought that there’s no need to get personal and show that kind of disrespect,” Denton said.

Watching an event on YouTube is different from being there, of course. The mood at Trinity restaurant was mostly upbeat and jocular. McCain opened with a joke that compared lawyers to “scum-sucking bottom feeders,” then told another about drunk Irishmen.

“He answered it pretty well and he laughed a little bit himself,” said James Walsh, the co-owner of Trinity. “It just kind of caught everyone off guard.”

Staff writer Michael Welles Shapiro contributed to this report.

Cartoon by Drew Sheneman/The Star Ledger

The early primary season is based on one uniting theory: the candidate who is going to win is the one that has the most momentum, and the candidate with the most momentum is the one that won the previous primary, which was wan by the candidate with the most momentum, etc etc, reductio absurdum.

It’s posited to us that the Iowa caucuses set the tone for the entire year, that they are the pre-pre games that determine which teams wind up in the Super Bowl. This is the problem of our media, in that we’re only able to cover the presidential contest as a horse race, more focused on measuring the inches between candidates rather than the issues that separate them. From above, you’d think they’re covering a particularly abortion-obsessed game of Plants vs. Zombies. Covering electoral politics like the NFL is what keeps CNN and Fox News burning on TVs all year long.

But did you know that only two candidates — George W. Bush and Barack Obama — who won the caucuses went on to win the presidency? And the rest of the stats are even less impressive: The caucuses have only picked the eventual nominee for either party 63 percent of the time since they first rose to prominence in 1972. That’s an awesome D minus average for predictability, yet we’ve been getting wall-to-wall coverage of it for months now, with the cable news stations treating it like every one of Iowa’s 3 million residents is some sort of soothsaying wizard consulting mystical corn husks until they finally share their wisdom with the rest of the world this week.

So the primary cycle looks like this, and all it takes is one catalyst win for pundits and lots of other people sitting behind tables on TV to spark the cycle into motion even when, it turns out, there are actually 49 other states in the nation that might have opinions of their own that are vastly different from Iowans:

And by the time the primaries have gotten around to parts of the country more varied in population than Iowa and New Hampshire, the unstoppable presidential campaign megalodon has declared the “feeling of inevitability” so why bother campaigning anywhere else in the country? Huh, Rudy Giuliani? Why were you so silly to think you can avoid places that set the tone for this whole circus and just do the logical thing and focus on Florida, where your base of support was? It’s like the Grammys: everyone in the industry knows it’s a ridiculous ceremony not representative of the actual state of taste for the year, yet everyone puts on their tux and dress and does a little bow in front of the old white guys who act like they arbiter national taste. Because that’s the way we do it, and it’s important if we say it’s important.

Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times last week that we should “feel free to ignore Iowa” because of not only its demographic misrepresentation of the rest of the country but also, notably, some of the major Republican candidates haven’t even spent much time there this year, when the whole point of the damn caucus in the first place is supposed to be that the informed Iowans got a chance to personally meet and talk with the candidates (again, that elevated class of wizened uber-voters supposed to represent the high-mindedness the rest of us don’t have  time to worry about — we’re very busy here on the coasts producing Culture, you know!). Collins summarizes: “On Tuesday, there will be a contest to select the preferred candidate of a small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican. The whole world will be watching.”

Collins’ call to ignore these “ridiculous” Iowa system not withstanding, who are the people actually making these decisions that set that whole flow chart in motion? It’s the 1 percent! No, not the bête noire 1 percent of Occupy Wall Street, but the statistical 1 percent of people Who Have Time to Caucus and Care to Do It.

We’re talking about 1 percent of the population of Iowa, 1 percent that actually weigh in on these things that thenceforth become a barometer for the whole election year to come. Collins notes the Republicans were hoping for a turnout of 100,000 this week — an amount that is just 3 percent of the whole population of the state, slightly less than the amount needed to fill the Michigan Wolverine’s football stadium. In 2008, CNN touted both sides for having “record turnout:” 120,000 for the elephants and 227,000 for donkey town.

In 2000, George W. Bush won the caucus with about 36 percent of the vote— 1.2 percent of the population. Last time around in 2008, Mike Huckabee came out the winner, getting support from the practically brag-worthy 1.3 percent of Iowans. Even farther back, George Bush the First won about 1.3 percent in the 1980 caucus, and somehow that massive groundswell of support still wasn’t enough to beat Reagan for the nomination that year.  That 1 percent of Iowa population is barely .01 percent of the total US population, FYI.

Of course, this is the open secret among the media who know damn well that Iowa is just Iowa and that it’s not America, but they still stick to this now decades-old trope about the soothsaying of the caucuses because, well, what the hell else are they supposed to do to fill the time before the election run up materialized to a point where we could have some informed commentary on it. Go out and do ACTUAL REPORTING? But Begala! He doesn’t like the outdoors! If that happened, our nation’s television graphics and touch-screen display device economies would plummet dramatically.

Tuesday morning on WNYC, Brian Lehrer posited the idea that maybe we should rotate the dates of the early caucuses and primaries to give other states a shot at being noticed once in awhile during an election year. Would that ever work? It seems to me it would be a more representative way to make our nation feel like every part of it was involved in the electoral process (also, could we just do them all on one day? You guys could stop fighting over “firsts” like childish blog commenters then).

But the political machines, media and parties would never go for it, because they have their narrative and they’re loathe to diverge from it, because American democracy is best when reduced to a game of surges and polls, debates and gaffs, plants and zombies. And the rest of us are left tuning in to the dalliances of 1 percent of Iowans, wondering if maybe they would let the rest of us have a turn once in awhile.

Election data via: http://uselectionatlas.org/

2. My Pretty Pony, from season 3 of Veronica Mars*, featuring Paul Rudd in a  great cameo playing in a clearly grunge-era band attempting to do a resurgence for the millennial generation after a fall-from-grace psychological breakdown.

3. The fictional band in my head (called something like Horse Radish [rad-ish in the tubular sense, that is]) in which we wrote and recorded “Someday I Will Treat You Good” five years before Sparklehorse did.

(*have you not watched Veronica Mars? If you like Party Down, you should watch Veronica Mars. If you don’t like Party Down, get the hell off my wordpress this instant.)

Hitchens rides a bike. Via Vanity Fair

On Dec. 12, I participated in my third PUNDERDOME 3000 in Park Slope, an event that is exactly what it sounds like (if you’re saying “I mustache you a question” about this, I humbly request you shave it for later).

One of the semi final categories was WILL SMITH; On my turn, I opened with, “I heard that Will Smith’s favorite Atlantic writer was Christopher HITCHens.”

And then, three days later, Christopher Hitchens died  (incidentally giving us the only repeated use of the term “polemicist” in modern obituary history).

If this trend continues, things that also should be on the lookout: Big Willie Smiles, Fresh Prints, Giant Goddamn Steampunk Spider.

RIP Hitch. You were an asshole sometimes, but you were damn good at it, and sometimes I’ll take an asshole who can make words sing over a caring person who doesn’t know the difference between polemics and Pilates.

(OK, final side note: when you google image search “polemics Pilates,” the first result is Maureen Dowd reading Maxim. What does this mean???)

Emma Strauberry

Jen Carlsjrson

Puree Shafrir

Anil Mrs. Dash

Nate Freerangechicken

Brian Rieses Pieces

Rosie Gravy

Carl Ron Swanson’s Breakfast

Choire Sriracha

Alex Balkan Tulumbe 

Jim Brûlée

Emily Gulden’s

Kat Stouffers

Jen Dahl

Dill Keller

Sachertorte Frere-Jones

Joe Cous-couscarelli

Hugo Limburger

Ryan O’krannel

Edith Zeppoleman 

Lawrence Ryeght

Jennifer Veganburger 

Molson Whitehead

Jonathan Franzia

Brian Speltler 

David Carrbonara

Td

[STUPID PIECE WENT HERE AND HERE AND HERE]

Dec 23, 2011 at 9:33 AM, Choire Sicha wrote:
>TIM.

You are so wrong in the head!

Dec 23, 2011 at 9:36 AM, Tim Donnelly wrote:
> sometimes I just have to amuse myself.

Dec 23, 2011 at 9:39 AM, Choire Sicha wrote:
>SICK MONSTER!!!

Hey, it's the first ever Inverted Soapbox post! Meta meta.

Readers here will notice the flood of posts has dried up to an infrequent drizzle over the past year or so and it’s due in no small part to being Actually Busy with Work That’s Read By More Than Four People. And this is the problem with blogs, the personal kind you start when you’ve got nothing else to do, say you’re maybe a frustrated reporter stuck at a small-town paper writing the same rezoning stories over and over again like some sort of Mac-toting Sisyphus.

So then you find yourself (not complaining at all) in the position of spending 8am-10pm some days in front of the computer writing, posting, editing, reporting, re-editing, pre-posting and working on even more pitches to give yourself even more writing and reporting work, and by the end of the day you’re so dead tired of staring at the computer screen and banging out content that you want to spend your one free hour chugging Trader Joe’s wine and killing an episode or two of Dr. Who. Which is why, if you ever look around the internet, you see lots of withered and abandoned blogs among the recently promoted set of the internet, the folks who had time once to blather away to their little corner of the internet before, you know, a bigger audience might look them up. Suddenly this little webspace that once contained emo ramblings about breaking up with a girl in South Carolina (long-since deleted) or what the iPhone means for the death of the bar argument (still up here somewhere) suddenly might be stumbled upon by someone I’m trying to profile for Inc. (like this guy) or, yikes!, even a potential date (Yes, I know who you are, sometimes. Statcounter is like reverse stalking: stalking the people who are stalking you. Does that count as stalking? Yes, I’m asking you, stalker). 

That’s not to say there’s not still value here. I’ve blogged it before, but it’s worth repeating: when you’re a down-and-out writer trying to figure out what to do with yourself and just looking for any damn receptacle to empty your brain’s spit valve into, there’s something empowering about being able to hit a big fat blue PUBLISH button any time you want, and then, bam!, you’ve got something out there that’s just as globally accessible as the latest New York Times update. How people managed to stay sane in the world before the internet gave an instant dumping ground, I’ll never know. It’d probably be like living in a world without masturbation, where none of the attractive girls ever wanted to stop and talk to you.

Here I find myself, fighting sleep and sitting up late in our Brooklyn home office, thinking about all the work I’m supposed to do tomorrow, nearly three years after I started this damn thing after filing a story at a bar on Hilton Head, where I could barely get a few minutes to myself to concentrate in between being berated by the drunken happy hour locals asking me what I was working on. And now I’m less obsessed about checking page views here, thinking that maybe, possibly?, someone with some Eye For Talent might read this thing and offer me a writing job of some caliber, which is, it turns out, not something that happens. But I’m less obsessed about it now because I’ve transferred obsession elsewhere: checking the stats on Brokelyn posts, looking for linkbacks on Inc. stories, watching for Facebook shares over at Thought Catalog, all of it mashed together in some sort of ever-spinning numbers game (Dreidel?) that is hell for those of us prone to obsessive compulsive type behavior, especially when you have real-time stats that let you follow every click, every share, every second of every day. So it becomes less important to see if, say, a post here about Simpler Times beer or the Hipster Grifter (memories!) goes viral here, though it’s always a nice bonus if it does.

Maybe the highlight of this blog will be getting included on the FreeWilliamsburg blogroll,  a role I’ve surely disappointed due to aforementioned lack of posting. But this space was never meant to be an entity on its own, never meant to have a focus, or a specific audience, or a mandate for change, or whatever. It was, at best, meant to develop a voice and to keep flexing some writing muscles even in the most dire depths of daily newspaper reporting (and subsequent unemployment). Which it certainly did.

And now we’re here, in 2011, when a WordPress blog feels like a clunky old dinosaur because all anyone wants to read is short burst pictures and memes on Tumblr, and writing anything longer than 100 words is like it’s an invitation for people to click away to something more immediately satisfying, like a list of unintentionally hilarious superheroes.

So basically all this is about the problem of being too busy to spend time overly reflecting on minuscule stuff that doesn’t matter for an audience that may or not be listening, which, again, is not a real problem at all. The internet is littered with the husks of blogs that never got off the ground (you know who you are) and I never wanted this to be one of them, even if after three years we’ve slowed to a trickle of posts and sometimes I spend too much time playing with SEO terms elsewhere to spend 20 minutes here.

It’s hard to sit down at night and think about blabbing ad nauseum here when a similar expenditure of effort could go into pitching something for any number of publications I should be trying to write for — a SUPER FULFILLING AND TOTALLY REWARDING PROCESS THAT DOES NOT MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A WORTHLESS WRITER AT ALL WHEN NO ONE EVEN GIVES A COURTESY RESPONSE, (assuming you can render that part of the sentence in the new sarcastic font — or even just busting out the same thing for Thought Catalog, whose editors would graciously run it and give it a real audience, full of sharers and commenters and haters and the lot. So why do it? Because it’s 2 in the morning and I’m a bottle deep into the two buck chuck and I can’t exactly write something for Inc. magazine at this time, right?

I gave advice to young (read: college-aged. Because I’m A BILLION YEARS OLD NOW) journalists once that the best thing you can do when you’re starting out is to blog, blog, blog, blog your heart out, because, simply, why the fuck would you wait for anyone else to tell you that you can publish something you think is important? If you’re trying to be a for-real journalist, leave your personal opinions out of it, but get out there and dig up your own stories, your own narrative, and get your writing out into the world, every damn day you can. Every time you hit that juicy PUBLISH button, you feel the electric rush of responsibility and power that used to be the domain of just a select few.

So, as a test to see if anyone is still reading, I got a tattoo two weeks ago of this symbol, which you’ll only get if you spent any time working in newspapers where crusty old people still held onto anachronistic typographical traditions. But it symbolizes an end, the end to the idea that things would always be the easy track of newspaper conquest that I pictured in college, and the acceptance that the era of newspaper and print media I coveted so hard had were killed with the curt efficiency of a stern night city editor. And it was a celebration of turning 30 this year, getting published in The Atlantic online and a feeling that things might just be going OK.  After that, the world is full of possibilities.

I follow Xeni’s work regularly, and even though I don’t know her personally, I think at this point it’s fair to say I’m pretty sick of cancer wreaking a pretty devastating path across this 30 years of life, claiming family, friends and friends who are so close they are most certainly family.

At last count, I am among a group of six close friends who all lost fathers to cancer of one form or another, including three of us to whom it happened with the same three-year period. A gallows humor club known as the Dead Fathers Society. And there’s more and more and more, breast cancer, prostate cancer, leukemia, thyroid, whatever. Does it stop? What else can you do except fight on and on? Tell it, XKCD.