I heard an interview on WNYC this morning with Joe Conason, the writer of the much-celebrated new book Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth and it was completely disarming. Conason, not for the first time, contends that it was the Clinton administration that foresaw future terrorism coming to the U.S., that they had started to prepare the country for a 9/11-type event, and that its staff briefed Condoleeza Rice and friends about the inevitability of an attack. Bush ignored their advice and Cheny set up a terrorism task-force that never met until after 9/11.
Most interestingly, he talked about how Bush et. al. pulled together the resources, while almost all planes were grounded, to evacuate Bin Laden relatives (about 140 of them!) out of the country to Saudi Arabia on the request of Bush’s old pals in the oil-based government. This is a little featured report, but it did make the New York Times’ page 11 yesterday. The FBI, our eternal watchdog, never questioned the family members about their involvement in 9/11. Excuse me now while I throw up.

I always wondered what “les blogues” looked like in Franceand I finally found a nice example of one that is as smart as it is French.
In other news, I once again tried Johnson’s Baby Shampoo after more than, perhaps, 30 years and yes, it’s formula is still “No More Tears.” Unfortunately, that same crappy formula burns the inside of my eyelids just as it did when I was 6. No More Johnson’s Baby Shampoo for me.

A few days ago, I posted something about “dirty design” and my pal forwarded an email from his student who designed this site:Dirt Style 101. Note that even the title is wrong. It’s absolutely terrible but worth playing with if you have any interest in what most sites looked like in 2003 (sorry, I mean 1993). Oh, and the content is badly funny.

Lately, if you ask my daughter how old she is, she answers, not incorrectly, “one.” This in and of itself astounds me as she she’s been doing this since 14 months of age. But I’m even more wowwed by her other answers to age questions. When I ask, “How old am I?” she replies, “one.” When I ask how old mommy is, she replies, “one.” And so on and so forth. But it’s made me rethink the idea of age; in some ways, we’re kind of all one year of age. Humans are newbies on this planet, just seconds old compared to other, more funky, lifeforms like horseshoe crabs. And we’re all pretty close in age in the great scheme of things. My grandmother died at 92, which I grant you is 91 years older than her great-granddaughter; but really, it’s a short amount of time, a blip in the universal wristwatch and I tend to think that all our time on this planet is compressed at the ripe age of “one.” We’ll always be one, as the Kabbalists have noted long before I.

While 9.11 is the day that lives in all our heads in NYC 24 hours a day (well, maybe mine still), 9.1 is the day that changed the world and I seek to commemorate that day again. It’s the day that Germany blitzed into Poland in 1939, the day that the Nazi party decided it could move East with little fanfare, and it was the day that the world became aware dark matter filling the hole of Europe. It’s also the day that the Wizard of Oz was released in the U.S., as I’ve probably mentioned many years earlier to those who are friends.
That incredible juxtaposition informs much of my small brain. So, herein are some ideas for new brands that might just succeed in the U.S. What’s odd is that I actually think this kind of ideation, at least these days, is profitable. Feel free to steal:
Third Reich Steaks
Pol Potstickers
Stalin Salads
Pinochet Potatoes
Taylor Turnovers

Mr. Schwarzenegger really gives it away in today’s Smoking Gun xerox of Oui’s Conversation with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1977. The “piece” (sorry) is a fascinating cultural document of the times, when group sex was considered fashionable, penis size was something you couldn’t change, and getting whatever you can out of chicks was professionally cool.

No, not the ones you’re thinking of. I had lunch with my favorite Web Producer today and we were talking about the good possibility that old, old web design will look really nice soon. You know the kind of which I speak — lots of Times Roman text, purple and blue underlines, multicolor headlines, and odd animated gifs.
He said that in one of his classes, the term “dirty design” was what one of the kids called it, and I think that’s right on. I will keep looking for samples of dirty design (perhaps mostly on Geocities, the worst purchase Yahoo! ever made), but it’s not too hard to find.
Importantly, it’s my duty to note that there is both a class and a technology component to dirty design; folks who do not have the time, education, patience, or druthers to build an easily navigable, useful site are not designers and shouldn’t be held up the same light as designers should. Afterall, we don’t ask nurse practioners to heal the same way we do doctors and we don’t judge little league the way we do pro ball. But, and here’s the butt, it would still be really cool to see some nicely designed, bad-looking websites. Send them to me?

A friend passed this photo from Snopes.com today of what someone with Photoshop thought the U.S. would look like during the blackout a few weeks ago. It’s an amazingly poor image, but funny in it’s poverty and admission of defeat on the part of the perpetrator. Scroll down the page and you’ll see what the country actually looked like during the emergency.

For anyone who doubts that XHTML and CSS are here to stay in designing and building websites, here is the proof. It’s not very interesting to most people now but it will be when TiVo is bought by AOL and Yahoo! owns CNN and everyone needs to redesign their websites because the only thing that can view everything will be Google’s new browser.
The latter link will actually take you to the new Seth Godin e-book (well, it’s a PDF) about what Google should do next. Yours truly is quoted, which is as hard to believe as it is true.

[embarrased]All this time, I actually didn’t know what the heck “emo” is. I knew intuitively, having read about emo music and emo bands and emo tunes, and I knew that it was an abbreviation for something. I also knew that bands early 90s bands like Minor Threat and the Pixies and Fugazi were important predecessors to the musical genre called “emo.” I thought that maybe it had something to do with an ironic reference to the weirdo Emo Phillips, who is and always was so average. It turns out “emo” is short for “emotional”, which is long for every band reviewed in Spin magazine these days.[/embarrased]