The Connection, one of NPR's morning shows, did a segment today with George Packer, who wrote about his love/hate relationship with blogs in Mother Jones earlier this month. David Adesnik of OxBlog was also a guest, and Packer mentioned that he had been taken aback a few months ago when he met David and chatted with him about his dissertation, only to find that within a few hours their conversation had been blogged for the entire world to see.

So what does David do? Within 30 minutes of being on the air with Packer he's already blogged about it! That's showing him!

I was on for a few minutes after David, but as usual with radio there wasn't really time to say much of anything, although I did manage to get in a plug for Phil Carter's expert coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

I have to admit that I was laughing as I listened to the lead-in, with Packer talking about how he finds himself getting sucked into blogs for hours at a time and is now trying to wean himself off his addiction. He sounded like a three-time loser promising that he was going to kick the habit and this time he really means it!

Continue reading "Everybody Wants To Rule The Blogosphere" »

Sitting around our apartment the other day, it occurred to us that, what with being engaged and all, it would probably be wise of us to begin planning a wedding of some sort. But we didn't feel like going into all-out planning mode just yet (that will require several trips to Staples for the appropriate organizational accoutrements), so we figured we'd start with something easy: Color. How hard can it be to pick a color scheme for a wedding?

It turns out not to be all that easy, largely because it's unclear where to start. We began by trying to pick a "theme" for the wedding, and after immediately rejecting such Bar-Mitzvah classics as "Spiderman" and "Computers," we decided to concentrate on colors. (Although how cool would it be to have t-shirts that said "I surfed the net at Dan and Jenny's Wedding!"? Answer: Not very.)

The just-think-about-colors strategy was also problematic. We started by naming colors we like, but it soon became clear that this would be about as effective as trying to name a child by writing down our favorite letters. Wedding colors have to go together in basically every single aspect of the wedding, and we just weren't playing at that level.

This strategy was also difficult partially because it's hard to translate colors in your head into what an actual wedding would look like. I remember a few months ago when we were picking paint for the wall, we found a lot of colors we liked, but kept wondering whether they would look good on a wall. A wall. Basically, we were unsure whether a tiny square of color would look good as a much bigger square of color. So imagine trying to figure out how a tiny square of color would look on dresses, tuxes, gowns, floral arrangements, tablecloths, cakes, party favors, and all other manner of wedding items, and you'll begin to understand the magnitude of our problem.

So we turned to our trusty friend, Google. (I have a feeling that by the end of this, I'm going to ask Google to be my Best Man.) Google helpfully turned up this web site, which actually has a number of decent color schemes. I particularly liked the ones involving "chocolate" and "ivory," along with some other color, possibly a bold red. (I am also somewhat open to pink and orange.) Jen seemed to like the greens and purples more, which I was not wild about, but felt that I could be persuaded to like, largely because I can be persuaded to like more or less anything that Jen likes. Overall, though, we again ran up against the "little squares" conundrum. This web site would have been great if our wedding consisted solely of two brightly-colored rectangles (which might actually be a good wedding theme, if I were the inventor of Pong), but we definitely need something more actual-wedding-oriented.