I read it twice. I kept stumbling over the phrase “infamous picture.” Infamous? I had never heard of it, and the show in question aired in April. Picture? Jon Stewart doesn’t make pictures. He makes clips.  And clips are as easy to circulate as pictures, nowadays. It made me want to see the clip, which is below.

In no particularly order:

1. The vagina manger shot really is pretty stupid. It’s a tasteless, juvenile gag in an otherwise brilliant analysis.

2. In fact, you can even see Stewart stumble over it. He says he hadn’t seen the finished photo before.  He seems to know it’s not right.  It would have worked better (probably) if the manger were much much larger and the ladyparts smaller. Or they could have skipped it and not lost anything.

3. On the other hand, it’s a throwaway, embedded in one of Stewart’s typically sharp semiotic analyses, this one concerning the way the word “war” gets used in social issues debates. This is the part Donohue doesn’t want you to know about, because it exposes exactly the kind of rhetorical game that he thrives on. That’s why this is an “infamous picture” and not a clip.

It’s more of the foot-stomping and witch-hunting superbly depicted by MoDo on Sunday.

Was it a great joke? No. Do we understand that our best satirists — Pryor, Twain, Carlin — will occasionally veer into the sophomoric or objectionable while making an important grown-up point?  We do.  We get that those two temperamental features are usually yoked together.

Stewart is the guy who uses the f-word while yelling that the shell game is rigged. Donohue is the guy running the shell game. For obvious reasons, he wants to make it all about the bad language.

By the way, Delta pulled its ads over this, as if you needed yet another reason not to fly Delta. 

By way of contrast, Kellogg’s hung in there against pressure. I’m a Kashi guy these days, but I might just run out and buy some delicious Kellogg’s cereal.

The early promise of the interactive ‘net got very complicated as all of us who write and publish discovered that the comment feature attracted a personality type we just hadn’t seen before in such persistent numbers.  I don’t think I need to paint you a picture.  Most sites have struggled to create new policies.

At the Courant, things got a lot better with the switch to Facebook-based commenting on the main platform. Over here on the blogs, we have a different system, run by the individual blogger.

I’ve been thinking lately about what my current policy is …or should be.

It goes something like this:

1. Comments that are essentially ad hominem attacks won’t stay up. You’re invited and encouraged to disagree with what I say. But if what you say is a lot of name-calling and invective dressed up as disagreement, it won’t stay up.

2. Another way to think about this: Would a fifth grade teacher let you express yourself this way in a classroom discussion? If you’d be made to go sit in a corner, your comment won’t stay up.

If  I decide your entire purpose in being here is to grind out some personal animosity toward me, I’ll take your comments down.  This is, virtually, where I work. If you stood there in your local 7-Eleven every day taunting the guy who made your Slurpee, eventually, they’d have you removed.

Be interesting. Be challenging. Be contentious. Don’t be a nuisance.

You can listen to a spirited discussion of the campaign here.

You will hear one of the other panelists mention something that I too have heard about the singing of the new state pop anthem.

K-Dawg has an interesting take on the campaign, although I have to disagree with him and his echt conservative commenters on the Griswold case.  In fact, they seem to be taking a distinctly non-conservative stance: The only things we can ever celebrate here in Connecticut are things in which the government played the key role.  Right? Is that what you guys are saying?  We can’t celebrate Estelle Griswold as a hero for taking on the government?  (Pssssst! That’s kind of what “revolutionary” means.)

But if we’re going to get jazzed about the sexual revolution component of Connecticut, we need a little park or something. With rides.

But to be horribly injured is not to be infallible. And the more the Petits inject themselves into the political process, the more the rest of us must struggle to put their comments into context.

As a matter of conscience, I object to their letter about Roraback.

First, I question whether it’s reasonable to say that a public figure and candidate for office, asked a question on a live radio show, cannot invoke the Petit name without first seeking their permission.  That would be a reasonable position  if, since the tragedy, they had been reclusive and reluctant to be dragged into public debate. They have been the opposite. They have been active at the State Capitol in a way that is, as far as I know, without precedent in the history of the death penalty debate. To suggest that one can publish, lobby and testify on an issue and that, subsequently, nobody can cite those views without permission seems like a rule made by the Red Queen.

Second, I listened again to Roraback’s remarks.  It seems to me that he did nothing more than state exactly the Petit position as way of explaining why he did exactly what the Petits wanted people to do. He voted against repeal because no one could guarantee that repeal would not be used as a way of sparing Hayes,  Komisarjevsky and the other death row inmates.  People who oppose the death penalty were disppointed, and rightly so, in Roraback’s switch. People who hold to the Petit view have no reason to complain about what he did or what he said. Unless…

…Unless the Petits have simply put themselves at the disposal of the Wilson-Foley campaign.  This letter is so saturated in the language of a political campaign that it’s hard not to wonder where the idea for it began.

Again, bear in mind that Roraback is being attacked in this letter for doing exactly what the Petits said they wanted lawmakers to do for exactly the reason the Petits said was the right reason. Which is odd.

I didn’t like the way Roraback let Wilson-Foley back him down on this issue, but here I’m going to pick up a striped shirt and a whistle and say he committed no foul in that interview. They whipped him into submission. Now they want to kick him for bowing to the very pressure they applied. Doesn’t really make sense except as a purely political act.

And, yes, I know I am on very thin ice.

While I’m at it, I think I may have been molested by Kedso.

Monday night I saw “The Avengers.”

Tuesday night I saw “Footnote.”

I liked “The Avengers” better. Should I feel guilty?

As one might expect with the launch of a huge new initiative, MediaStorm exploded yesterday with …nothing. “Nothing” is a tricky concept with MediaStorm, because the company’s Twitter account has lain dormant since last July.   Its Facebook page has been inactive for a similar amount of time.  The company has not posted any “news” to its own website since January of 2011. It does not list the state or the lead agency, Chowder, among its clients. 

So …it’s a media company that doesn’t do media? Kind of a zen thing? A front for U.N.C.L.E.? Loki’s East Coast office?

One of their slogans is “Creating actionable results.”

Might want to get out the dictionary for that one, boys.

Asked if he would appear in the ads, like former Gov. John G. Rowland and his wife Patty did, Malloy said appearing in the ads was not appealing to him

I’ll probably write my column this week on the branding campaign. It’s growing on me, a little.

But one important way to differentiate it from past efforts would be to stick to the idea of not having elected officials appear in advertisements paid for out of state funds. Rowland famously used them as unregulated campaign ads. So did Bysiewicz and Rell. No more of this, please.

Her latest move has been bailing on her WNPR interview. You’d think a golf course manager could keep a tee time, but Wilson-Foley chickened out because the promos mentioned her Rowland connection. Everybody who goes through Mr. Dankosky’s political interviews knows two things (a) he’s going to bring up the uncomfortable question and (b) he’s going to move on and give you lots of chances to exhibit your thinking on other topics, assuming you have any. So what big boys and big girls do is sit up straight and get through the part where the doctor says “This is going to hurt a little.” (Tip: it hurts even more if you drag it out. Bysiewicz managed to extend the most uncomfortable part of her conversation by appearing to suggest that she has never sought the office of governor when in fact she has done so twice. This made it difficult to move on from that topic and get to the incredibly spontaneous cascade of positive phone calls, which included more plants than the average nursery operation.)

Anyway, Wilson-Foley didn’t want to face even a few bars of the music, so she turned tail and fled. Let me helpfully compile a list of interviewers who will NOT ask her about Rowland.  Well, there’s Rowland, but that one’s off the table.  Dunaway, Vicevich, Brad Davis. Hmmmm.  Somebody in Waterbury. Who else am I missing? There should be nine if we’re fielding a softball team.

Let me conclude by saying that the Wilson-Foley campaign has also been indulging in the time-worn dishonorable practice of the whispered smear against an opponent. It’s a tough thing to talk about without repeating the smear which, in this case, is wild speculation as opposed to anything even slightly based in fact. They should stop. It’s disgusting. It’s on page 8 of the old Rowland playbook too.

As I say, I don’t know this woman. But her campaign is that of a lightweight with few principles.

(UPDATE: Commenters — here and ESPECIALLY on my Facebook page have made a compelling case that Connecticut was revolutionary in other ways. I suspect they have now done more collective thinking about this than the people who put together this campaign.)

“Still revolutionary” is not a terrible slogan.

But it’s a very odd choice for a state whose most famous contribution to the American Revolution was Benedict Arnold.

Connecticut does not have the storied Revolutionary history that some other states have,. There are no famous battlefields and not much else to look at.There’s Jonathan Trumbull’s war office, shown here in all its spine-tingling glory. Connecticut was sometimes known as the “provision state” during the war because we were so good at the boring side of war — providing pots and tents and bowls and socks and stuff like that. And Trumbull was a big part of running the finances of the war.

This was not a hotbed of discontent with the crown, not the way Boston was. As in so many other things, we were more plodding and cautious. And in fact, the western part of the state was fairly heavy with Tory loyalists.

Nathan Hale is a good story, but Hale was unheard of during the war. His legend was located and burnished much later, partly because Connecticut and Yale seemed light on good revolution stories.

So, we wouldn’t have to be all that revolutionary to be still as revolutionary as we used to be.

Source for photo here.

I’m feeling love
This young heart of mine

Follow your heart
Born to inspire
Under the stars
The view looks much better with you.

Yeeah!

I’m reaching out and now my aim is true
Follow the sky
Maybe on the river
Uunder the stars
The view looks much better with you.

As an act of hubris, I’m going to claim some tiny fraction-of-a-percent credit for the Susan Campbell phenomenon. I was an already-entrenched columnist when she was hired as a feature writer. Another writer named David Jacobson was hired the same day, and the three of us became great friends. You could make a good case that David is a better writer than either one of us, and writers at other publications always seemed to know about him and to admire his work.  Susan had something else, something he didn’t have. Readers — regular folks — noticed the person behind the byline right away. It almost didn’t matter what she wrote about. There was just the sense of a warm-blooded human there, and that’s the deal-maker for columnists. So I commenced agitating for her to be one. I don’t know. Maybe I still don’t deserve any credit, because there isn’t much proof anybody listened to me. It was going to happen sooner or later no matter what.

While all this was going on, we sat either next to or across from one another in a series of office configuration…for 9 years, but who’s counting? You think she’s ornery in print? You have no freakin’ idea. She’s also very entertaining. It was like living next to the world’s funniest volcano.

Years ago, a person from Missouri came to Hartford and plunged himself into a life of fine words and hell-raising and trouble-courting and mirth and anger and originality.  His name was Clemens. What were the odds that we would get another one of those? Again and again, over the years, I have been struck by the parallels.  On several occasions I have actually been struck, before I got good at dodging.

Anyway, she filed for the buyout, but in a larger sense, she is not really going anywhere. Which is fine by me.

I know some folks are going to jump on the comment thread and say some mean things about her, and I want them to know something borne out of decades of personal experience: she absolutely will not give a s–t.

And that’s just not going to happen.

What I want to say to Doug is: give this show about a month. You’ll either click with us, or you won’t. But we’re trying to do so much more than recycle a lot of political talking points that it’s kind of painful to think about going back to that. I miss certain aspects of my old show (although hardcore drive time political talk is not one of them), but the show we do these days is kind of the one that lived over the hill from my WTIC show.  It’s the show we were always on the verge of doing but couldn’t because of the constraints of the format and the nature of the audience.  (Commercial audiences tend to want predictability. That’s why guys like Rush do essentially the same show every day.) Anyway, our current show is not for everybody, and God knows, it’s not predictable. Physics, proms, the philosophy of lunch, Sherlock Holmes, guilty pleasures. Each of these was a whole-show topic in the last two weeks.

By Morten Oddvik (Over the hills and far away) via Wikimedia Commons

Anyway, we’re doing a little regrouping in the next couple of weeks (and Patrick Skahill, the Central Nervous System of the show, is taking a critically overdue vacation, which may force us into some different choices at the end of May).  And I’m thinking a bit more abstractedly about radio because I’m hosting an Ear Cave — one of Catie Talarski’s audio listening parties — on May 22 at La Paloma Sabanera in Hartford. More details on that when I get a clue about what I’m doing.

Anyway, here’s what the coming week looks like. Sorry Doug. No politics, until we get to The Nose, and even then there’s no guarantee.

MONDAY:  This is sort of a bookend to our show last week about fringe physicists. Amateurs – America?s self-invented tinkerers are back at it in their metaphorical garages, fiddling with everything from glow-in-the dark yogurt to space elevators. This American Life contributor Jack Hitt discusses his latest book, Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for American Character. We?ll talk to perhaps the greatest amateur of them all, former monk turned sidewalk astronomer, John Dobson.

TUESDAY: ?The Tempest? at Hartford Stage Company includes some aerial (and Ariel) stunts. And that got us thinking about how the sight of a human taking flight is still kind of exciting, whether it?s Cathy Rigby in ?Peter Pan? or ?The Avengers.? So we?re looking at the history of that illusion. And maybe not just the illusion. Do you know that guy?  We’re trying to reach him.

WEDNESDAY: We’re going to take a crack at something many others have tried: explaining jazz so that people who “don’t get jazz” will be less troubled by that notion. Pianist Noah Baerman performs in studio and explains the basics, playing examples he teaches in his 101 courses at Wesleyan University. Baerman says jazz doesn?t need to be scary – anybody can get it, you just need to listen for a few basic building blocks. Saxophonist Kris Allen also performs.

THURSDAY: About a month ago, I noticed that we were — even more than usual — in a constant forward stumble toward our next few shows. That’s kind of inevitable with our tiny staff and our large ambitions. But it’s no way to run a navy, and it prevents us thinking in extra-weird ways about shows nobody else would even try. We’?re going on a retreat to figure out future crazy shows. We’ll probably rebroadcast our puzzles show, featuring demi-god Will Shortz and Deb Amlen.

FRIDAY: The Nose gathers brilliant thinkers, puts them in a studio, turns their microphones up, and discusses the talk-worthy topics of the week – with your phone calls!

Imagine that they line up, ranked by the depth of their connections to one or both of the couple.

So you’ve got the wedding party and family, followed by people who were almost in the wedding party, other family and so on.

The people in spots 141 to 150 would have interesting stories to tell one another, don’t you think?

Do you have a story like that?

Consider today’s NYT page one.  That four-column head doesn’t happen very often.

When it does, it almost always occurs in a higher point size than that.

In a simple stroke, they have conveyed both magnitude and puniness. Both the frame-shattering boldness and the over-cautious backed-into tardiness are summed up.

The decision on the UConn women’s contract is a nasty piece of work and a giant Up Yours from the university to many of its constituencies. Chief among those are the long-time fans of the women’s team.  This group includes a sizable number of people who either don’t get cable or don’t get a package that includes SNY.  Within those groups are a lot of people who got behind women’s basketball when it wasn’t even remotely cool. It’s impossible to think about the program without thinking about those women fans — aged 50 to 90 — who never cared a rat’s patootie about sports but suddenly saw in those young women a kind of ascendance and excellence denied to them in their own youths. A decision made with so little thought for them is the kind of anti-humanistic decision I had hoped Herbst would generally avoid making in her tenure.

Every other aspect of this decision is a similarly depressing lunge into the shallow end. It prizes profit over nonprofit, commerce over community, opportunism over loyalty, slickness over knowledge, New York over Connecticut. There isn’t one aspect of the change that can be defended on any other basis besides grasping commercialism.

There has always been an abiding sense that the women’s program was more than a little different from the ruck of college moneyball.  The players get good grades, and they’re great citizens. They, with a few notable exceptions, stay with the the program for the full four years. Exceptionalism has been an easy claim to make about them.  And somehow, the idea that public television carried their games fit with all this.

We may look back at this decision as the first step away from that Eden and toward the Gehenna that is college sports in the 21st century.

“A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.”

Reading this — the newspaper in my hands — I had a brief pang of worrying that people will not read this kind of thing when they no longer hold newspapers in their hands. I suppose that tablets like the iPad provide a solution — because, face it, you’re not going to read a 2,000-word obit on your phone or even your netbook.

Graffiti by Scott Woods-Fehr from Saskatoon, Canada (Where The Wild Things Are), via Wikimedia Commons

Taking up the sport.

Getting dropped.

Shopping for the bike.

Falling.

Taking a bike safety class.

Setting a goal – (This one already fell apart).

Finding people to ride with.

A professional fitting.

Winter biking.

Nene Humphrey "Untitled Spoon Series" Ogden Museum of Art

MONDAY – Spoons – Discover the wonderful world of spoons! Meet potter and musician Guy Wolff and hear him play the spoons, hear from a spoon carver, a spoon historian, as well as a magician who will tell you the secret of spoon bending. Also, engineering the magical spork. Featuring NPR-type superstar guest Henry Petroski.

TUESDAY – Physics on the Fringe – Rock star professor of Physics at UConn, Ron Mallett, joins the author of “Physics on the Fringe” to talk about outsider theorists who are trying to solve big problems from way outside the box.

WEDNESDAY – Lunch - Rachel Levy and Rachel Larimore explain their different takes on lunch. Who leaves the office for an hour to eat lunch? Is it better for you, or is it best to stay put and get work done while you eat? Sea Tea Improv’s Julia Pistell shared her thoughts on lunch with This I Believe: “As a twenty-seven-year-old dreamer, I’ve already surpassed the average number of jobs an American has in a lifetime. I’m convinced that lunch breaks are the best way to maintain a sense of privacy, adventure, and self-worth in our work-obsessed culture. So I vow to always have lunch.”

THURSDAY – Prom – It’s about that time of year – Prom time! Or is it called THE prom? What’s changed about prom these days, and where did the whole idea come from? Listen with a date, or go stag. We’ll talk with photographer Mary Ellen Mark about her book Prom and with Sloane Crosley (How Did You Get This Number?) about her trying prom experiences. We want you to share your prom horror stories (and photos) e-mail colin@wnpr.org.

FRIDAY – The Nose covers all the talk-worthy stories of the week.

I think it is possible to watch the legislature at work late at night and think — instead of “what a bunch of monkey heads”  – “here are some people actually trying to get things right.”  Either that, or I’m getting soft after 30 + years.  Because many of them are indeed monkey heads.

Update: This is a really stupid editorial. But it’s good recycling. It recycles a very old — frequently wrong — argument against any kind of new thinking in an area like this. Business always says “this will kill us.” Then you put the change in, and they immediately adapt, and everything’s fine. If HBJ had devoted two seconds of thought to this instead of vomiting back the first thing they heard from business lobbyists, they might have seen an obvious antecedent: the, you know, Bottle Bill. Those of us who endured every Pat Sullivan-generated argument against this over years and years of sessions knew that the Bottle Bill would bring about something close to the End of Civilization as we know it. Except it didn’t. It even invented a new industry. It cleaned up the roads too. So stop whining and cowboy up. We’re going to be a national leader on this.

Update: Story I heard after the column was out of my hands.  At the first meeting between legislative leaders and the mattress industry, the latter group collectively threw up their hands and said this could never happen and that there had to be a national solution (which is code for this never will happen because we have lobbyists at that level whom we pay a lot of money to stop things like this.)

And to their everlasting credit, the legislators in the room said, in effect: “This is going to happen. We will have the votes, and we will have the governor. And then other states will look at it as a potential model. So this can happen with or without you.”

Withing 48 hours, the industry produced its own fully drafted version.

Mattress Springs By Angie from Sawara, Chiba-ken, Japan (Flickr) via Wikimedia Commons

I’d have to think.

Not WTIC’s finest — or happiest –hour. People who paid attention in 2008 will remember that I spoke no evil of WTIC and asked my fans to be kind to the people who answered the phones. I  still have great fondness for many of the people there, but I confess, this episode has stretched my patience with  WTIC to a snapping point. The editorial is not wrong. This is the station with the longest, proudest history in the state.  The story of WTIC is in many ways the story of Connecticut radio. And this is not a proud moment.

via Wikipedia

We had one of our most frenetic, high-participation shows ever, today. It was entirely devoted to, of all things, K-cup culture and the incredible, swift ascendance of the Keurig. (Check this story for details on that ascendance and for the Pete Best / Eduardo Saverin story of the guy who invented the Keurig and the got squeezed out of his own company for $50K).

One tale I had no time to tell was the saga of WNPR coffee culture. On my very first day of work here, I was upon on the executive floor of the building with John Dankosky when he was offered, for our Morlock floor, a spare Keurig.  I barely knew what one was, but I saw Mr. Dankosky stiffen in a way that has become familiar to me since.  It’s the tensing of a wild antelope preparing to bolt but not willing to show its hand. He did not want a Keurig on his floor but didn’t want to be overly emphatic in rejecting it.

Anyway, I later discovered that WNPR coffee culture is sort of a big deal and a manifestation of his leadership style. There’s a lot of ritual and consensus around it. Who’s going to brew up the pot? How many people are going to share it? How strong is it going to be? Who’s going to buy or bring in more coffee?  It’s all a metaphor for getting other stuff done.  If you’re a WNPR follower: Tucker, Patrick, Lucy and Mr. Dankosky are the most regular makers of communal coffee.   I never make it. (If I did, it would be too strong.) But I drink it. I also don’t participate in group-purchases of Zabar’s coffee. But I am “acquainted” with a homicidal maniac known as The Bunny-Man, who sometimes visits the Dankosky Building late at night and leaves cans of coffee, candy rabbits and, once, two unpleasant coffee cakes, for the staff to find.

William Tong has dropped out of the Senate campaign. He will, apparently, endorse Murphy later today.

I have no real rooting interest in this race, but I dislike watching the Machine get all its gears lined up, which is what is happening today.  I think it’s good for candidates to have to prove themselves, and Murphy hasn’t proved much to me. His performance on yesterday’s Where We Live was Jedi-like in its mind-clouding vacuousness. Mr. Dankosky is the state’s most skilled interviewer, and after 49 minutes all he knew was that these were not the droids he was looking for.

So I’m glad Bysiewicz is presumably in it to the presumably very bitter end. She has no other setting besides “burn the toast.” Good.  You want to be senator? Earn it.

Photo by By Menchi via Wikimedia Commons

Fighting Fifth Debate Photo by Michael McAndrews

Sometimes two sets of good intentions collide. I can’t say enough good things about the Register Citizen’s 5th District coverage (which seems, ironically,to have crashed while I was writing this). It’s a noble effort and a must-bookmark for those of us who have Political Compulsion Disorder. It’s part of a larger effort by the Journal Register Citizen Register Citizen Journal Journal newspapers to do political coverage better, a rare thing here in the twilight of newspapers. There is currently a plan among post-newspaper cyborgs of the future to send one of their own backwards through time to kill Matt DeRienzo when he is a little boy. We must hope this does not happen.

Another of their good intentions is the notion of involving their readers  in picking out questions for debates, which is  how the same people who broke and covered-the-crap-out-of the Rowland-meddling-in-the-5th story were able to host a debate yesterday at which this topic was not mentioned. In some way I refuse to learn about, the readers were allowed to vote this topic out of existence.

The readers are not always right.

They think they want “substance” which to them means statements about taxes and jobs, but what that leads to, in most debates, is a lot of very empty posturing. Anybody who says anything real is immediately pecked to death by the other chickens.  This is what happened to Roraback yesterday when he had the nerve to deviate from the tax Stalinism that passes for “debate” at a GOP gig. His proposal was actually thoughtful and a little closer to workable.  His reward was a lot of screeching, feces-tossing and chest thumping from the other monkey house inmates. Anybody can jump up and down in a cage screaming “I’m more Rubio than thou.” It doesn’t make it true.  This is not meaningful dialogue, although it does make me like Roraback a little more.

Meanwhile, the Rowland story is like one of those Agatha Christie novels in which everybody at the country house has some connection to the crime. There’s the willowy blonde whose husband was paying off the bad guy. There’s the sad Monkees haircut guy getting picked on. There’s the dogged, slightly plodding FBI agent who keeps saying the name of his town over and over like an incantation. There’s the edgy right wing dog shelter millionaire who put the kibosh on a deal with the bad guy. And there’s Justin Bernier who, by crime novel logic, must have done something really terrible because he’s the only person not easily connected to the Rowland nexus.

So they should have ignored the readers, at least for ten percent of the time, and asked the Rowland questions.  Debates aren’t really debates.  I mean, nobody really debates at debates. Candidates don’t honestly engage around the issues. They just ram their pre-scripted talking points into any available crevice. You learn more about them when you drag them where they don’t want to go.