The Enlightened Redneck

Worst Football Play In History (Revisited)

Posted on 09.01.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 11:04 pm

A year ago come Oct. 1, I uploaded to YouTube a 31-second news clip titled “Worst Football Play In History” and embedded it on this blog along with two other amazing football videos.

The clip I posted was modestly popular at the time but by no means a viral hit. The last time I looked at the stats a few months ago, the clip had been viewed more than 10,000. But it hit the viral big time last weekend when Prep Rally, a Yahoo sports blog, embedded the clip in a story about the latest gridiron embarrassment.

Comparing the clip I posted last fall with the new one, the blog concluded: “Amidst all the horrendous bloopers of past years, that Vermont finish seemed like the worst play ever … until today. Even champions have to retire some time, and the Vermont clip will always know it went out to, truly, the worst play in high school football history.”

I’ll let you decide the winner after watching both videos below (mine is the first one), but all I care about at the moment is that I’m now the proud digital papa of my first viral video. Thanks to Yahoo, the clip has been viewed nearly 725,000 times.

That’s not going to break any YouTube records — the fresher clip currently has more than 1.7 million views — but it’s still cool.

Filed under: Sports and Technology and Video
Comments: None

Friends Don’t Let Friends Check Them In

Posted on 08.21.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 11:18 pm

Facebook generated online buzz this week with the release of Facebook Places, the social network’s location-based service that lets users “check in” at stores, parks and other spots and tell their online friends they are there.

I’ve been playing Foursquare and Gowalla, two of the more popular check-in games, on my iPhone for the past few months, so initially I was excited to hear that Facebook had entered the games market. But as I learned more about Facebook Places and its privacy implications, my enthusiasm quickly waned.

The aspect of Places that bugs me the most — and the one that sent me rushing to my Facebook profile to change the privacy settings — lets other people check in their friends if they are at the same place. That’s a feature made for mischief, as explained in this video:

I would never check someone else in at a location without his or her permission, and I wouldn’t want anyone doing it to me. Friends just don’t let friends check them in.

That possibility is one of a few reasons parents should be concerned about their children using Facebook Places. They could be opening themselves to potential harm.
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Filed under: News & Politics and Parenting and Technology and Video
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A Generation With A New Name

Posted on 08.21.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:29 pm

Young people (and, sadly, too many adults who’ve never matured) say and do a lot of foolhardy things on the Internet that are likely to haunt them in one aspect of life or another some day. How will they ever escape the online mistakes of their youth?

Here’s an interesting and entirely plausible thought from Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites. “I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds.

But trying to hide your past could be more problematic than having it exposed. Just because an embarrassing picture, video or statement isn’t attached to a name doesn’t mean it never happened.

If someone remembers a face but can’t place a name with it, he may try to connect the online dots. And if he succeeds, a mere embarrassing moment could be exposed as an attempted cover-up. Public figures especially would be susceptible to such revelations, but they could impact anyone.

The better course of action is to monitor and limit young people’s access to social networks and to teach them how to behave online in the first place.

Filed under: Culture and Technology
Comments: None

Journalism TBD

Posted on 08.07.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:01 pm

Journalism has been in a state of upheaval for years. The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and people in the news business will tell you that the future of media in the digital age is still to be determined.

“To be determined” — sounds like a great name for a news outlet. And it is. TBD.com, a local news venture funded by the same company that built Politico, will go online in the Washington region next week.

I was immediately intrigued when the talk of the as-yet-unnamed TBD started in media circles several months ago. TBD had big money in the bank (from Allbritton Communications), and it had a digital news visionary at the helm (Jim Brady, who built washingtonpost.com). I also was ending a contract job at the time and eager to work in local journalism again, so I tried mightily to join the TBD team.

Alas, with so many qualified journalists in the Washington area looking for work, I never made the cut. So like many others, I’m relegated to watching from the sidelines as TBD tries to win the game of media innovation in a changing marketplace.

I like what I’ve seen and heard so far. For the past few months, TBD has been focused on building a network of more than 100 local bloggers whose work will supplement TBD’s original reporting. And yesterday, TBD shared more of its plans for rewriting the future of news. Here’s a recap by tweet from Steve Myers of Poynter Online:
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Filed under: Blogging and Business and Media and Technology
Comments: 2 Comments

Leaving On A Jet Bus

Posted on 08.06.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 11:25 pm

There’s no logical reason to build a school bus that gets 1 mile per 600 gallons and travels 367 miles per hour. But redneck logic demands that fun-loving bubbas do strange things to school buses.

Paul Stender of Indianapolis explains why his company built the world’s fastest bus: “I built the bus for two reasons. The first is to entertain people because, come on, it’s a jet bus. The second, is to keep kids off drugs. Jets are hot, drugs are not. … We do a lot of displays at schools and we are trying to show them there’s more to life than sitting in front of computers.”

I hope my children read that last bit and take it to heart; I hope my wife doesn’t because she’ll use it against me and this blog.

Filed under: Family and Human Interest and Rednecks and Technology and Video
Comments: None

The Great Recession In Action

Posted on 07.30.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:12 pm

If you’ve ever wondered what a recession looks like, wonder no more. This excellent time-lapse presentation of unemployment numbers from January 2007 through May 2010 captures the economic pain perfectly as the colors transition to black, representing unemployment of 10 percent or more:

I’d love to see a similar historical presentation of unemployment and other economic indicators for the years of the Great Depression.

Filed under: News & Politics and Technology and Video
Comments: None

A Super Big Gulp Of Farmville

Posted on 06.23.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 8:01 pm

It wasn’t long ago, maybe six months, that I incessantly teased my wife for playing Farmville on Facebook. The game looked lame. Who wants to waste time plowing digitally, planting and harvesting virtual crops, and collecting electronic feathers from chickens and milk from cows?

Then, amidst the tedious hours of unemployment, I started playing Farmville because I had way too much time to waste. I was hooked, even worse than my wife (and our young children, who began playing the role of hired farm hands when Mommy grew bored with the game). I’ve been gainfully employed for several months now, and I’m still playing Farmville!

My addiction is so strong that my wife has been feeding it by buying new Farmville goodies at 7-Eleven, including this Super Big Gulp cup that won me a pool-diving cow for my farm:

Fortunately, my boss, David All, is a big believer in the potential of social gaming to boost corporate and political brands. PR Week recently published his essay on the subject, and I am now one of the team members at the David All Group brainstorming ways to use social gaming as a promotional tool.

So Farmville is now both work and entertainment. It’s a sweet assignment.

Filed under: Business and Culture and Entertainment and Technology
Comments: None

Dr. Seuss’ Message To Uncle Sam

Posted on 03.26.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 11:01 pm

This is going viral on Facebook. I don’t know who wrote it, but it captures the spirit of a solid majority of the country not only this week but for more than a year:

I do not like it Uncle Sam, I do not like it Sam I Am. I do not like these dirty crooks, I do not like how they cook books. I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like their secret deals. I do not like this Speaker Nan, I do not like this ‘YES WE CAN’. I do not like this kind of hope, I do not like it Nope! Nope! Nope!

I have to say that as a writer, I would hate it if I wrote something that clever and it traveled all over the Internet without my name on it. This is what reminded me of the “The Bill Of No Rights” more than a decade after I unraveled that Internet copyright mystery.

Filed under: Entertainment and Government and Health and News & Politics and Technology
Comments: 4 Comments

An Internet Legend: ‘The Bill Of No Rights’

Posted on 03.26.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:54 pm

Back when President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, tried to force government-run health care on Americans as a right, libertarian Lewis Napper wrote an inspired piece of work he dubbed “The Bill Of No Rights.” It spread like wildfire on the Internet after a Georgia state lawmaker sent it to friends.

Napper’s name was lost in the electronic shuffle, and the lawmaker, Mitchell Kaye, ended up getting the credit for the masterpiece. I uncovered the mystery of authorship five years later while working at the online magazine IntellectualCapital.com.

This week, when President Obama signed a national health-care system into law, is a fitting time to revisit “The Bill Of No Rights” and the story behind it. Here’s what I wrote for IC:

Lewis Napper, a self-described “amateur philosopher and professional geek,” found his libertarian muse one day in 1993 while driving home for lunch from his job as a computer programmer near Jackson, Miss. The inspiration surfaced as he listened to a radio news report about President Clinton’s proposed national health-care plan.

As the chatter about “this right and that right” in the health-care arena increased, so did Napper’s frustration. What makes Americans think they have the right to any government-backed health care, he thought to himself. Or for that matter, what makes them think they have the right to any of the goodies distributed by a government that has become far too intrusive.

And then it hit him. All those misguided defenders of big government had perverted the intent of one of the founding documents of American democracy, the Bill of Rights. Within 15 minutes upon arriving home, Napper had composed his own addendum to the Bill of Rights just for those folks. He dubbed his satire “The Bill of No Rights” and forwarded it to a few friends.
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Filed under: Government and Health and Media and News & Politics and People and Technology
Comments: 2 Comments

The Internet Explained

Posted on 03.26.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 7:38 pm

“It’s an ethernet cable connected to the telephone poll that goes to the big scary room, and then it goes across the ocean to another computer somewhere else. That’s all it is. It’s a bunch of computers connected. That way we can all play games.”

Or in the memorable words of former Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska: “The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

Filed under: Just For Laughs and Technology and Video
Comments: None

Broadband For Rednecks Everywhere!

Posted on 03.11.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 1:37 pm

In my new role as the editorial director of Digital Society, I’ve been focused like a laser on high-speed Internet the past few weeks. The FCC will be releasing its national broadband plan in six days, so leaders of the commission have been making the rounds on the speaking circuit to promote pieces of the plan.

The central message of the plan is that all Americans need broadband access — Commissioner Michael Copps this week even joined the chorus of people proclaiming it as a “right” — so the government must take steps to ensure that the poor, minorities, the elderly and, yes, rednecks in rural areas are enlightened by the Internet.

The FCC is so committed to selling its plan that Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke to the Country Music Association’s board of directors at its meeting in Washington yesterday.

Of course, country bumpkins are way too backward to understand the high-tech lingo of the FCC, so Genachowski’s staff translated his speech into “Nashvillese” that features country music titles:

When I think of those “Country Roads” and “Wide Open Spaces” without broadband, I “Fall to Pieces” and say that’s “Crazy.” We need to address these “Unanswered Prayers.”

As FCC chairman, I have friends in high places and “Friends in Low Places,” and I’m pulled to and fro on policy issues, but “I Walk the Line.” That’s because telecom politics is like a “Ring of Fire.” First I have Senator Rockefeller telling me about a “Coal Miner’s Daughter” who can’t get wireless service in some “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Next, “I’m on the Road Again” to where “The Grass is Blue” and “A Boy Named Sue” stops me and says we need super-duper fast broadband all the way from “Boulder to Birmingham”” — and beyond, to “Galveston” and “El Paso.” He complains that his slow dial-up service can’t get to “Amarillo by Morning” and laments that America has gone round and round for years without a National Broadband Plan and plaintively asks, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

I explain — to the “Boy Named Sue” — that this issue is “Always on my Mind” and the lack of a plan should not make him “Hurt” or a “Man of Constant Sorrow” with his “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Instead, I tell him to “Take it Easy” — “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” … just try to “Keep on the Sunny Side” and dream “Sweet Dreams” — because A National Broadband Plan is coming. Next week.”

Don’t you feel so much more enlightened about broadband now?

Filed under: Entertainment and Government and Music and News & Politics and Redneck Humor and Redneck Music and Rednecks and Technology
Comments: None

The Blog Bash At FreedomWorks

Posted on 02.19.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 9:47 am

Conservatives are the talk of the town in Washington this week because of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that started yesterday, and FreedomWorks joined the festivities by hosting a “blog bash” at its headquarters last night. My wife and I were there.

Hot Air has the proof in picture. By sheer luck, we happened to be chatting with James Joyner of Outside the Beltway when FreedomWorks honored Ed Morrissey of Hot Air as its “Blogger of the Year.” My hot wife, Kimberly, is in the hot pink blouse in the right of the photo, and I’m the dude next to her having a really bad hair night. (I really need a haircut!)

Kudos to my friend Ed for the much-deserved honor. He also will be honored as CPAC’s “Blogger of the Year” today. Ed was one of the first bloggers I met after starting Beltway Blogroll for National Journal in 2005, and he is among the most thoughtful and fair-minded bloggers on the Web. If you don’t already read Hot Air, now under new management, then you should.

I blog there occasionally myself in Hot Air’s Greenroom. I just posted an entry there this morning in my new role as the editorial director of the free-market think tank Digital Society. The topic is the left’s spooky vision for media reform. Here’s an excerpt:

It took 90 minutes but Tuesday evening’s panel discussion about the future of news ultimately devolved into a predictable attack by media “reformers” on commercial media and communications companies that see the Internet as their “plaything.”

The panelists — Robert McChesney and John Nichols of Free Press, Jane Hamsher of the blog Firedoglake, and Ivan Roman of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists — all said their ideas for media reform depend first and foremost upon winning a fight for control of the Internet. Their idea of victory is government oversight and massive federal spending. …

McChesney accused phone and cable companies of having a business model aimed at “buying off politicians.” He called them monopolists who want “to take over and effectively privatize the Internet, make it their private plaything.”

McChesney’s rant against an imagined “rip off” perpetrated by “commercial media” is consistent with his oft-stated (but under-reported) “ultimate goal” of dismantling the capitalist system in general and getting rid of the “media capitalists” in particular. His perverted vision of a “free” press features a government that has regulatory and financial influence over both the infrastructure underpinning journalism and the people producing it.

Read the whole thing, and stay tuned to Digital Society for analysis of technology policy and how it can help or hurt America’s burgeoning digital culture and commerce.

Filed under: Blogging and Family and Government and Media and News & Politics and People and Technology
Comments: None

Two Cents On The Rubio-Crist Race

Posted on 01.12.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:35 pm

The battle for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Florida also has become a battle for the soul of the GOP. It pits grassroots conservatives who support underdog former state House Speaker Marco Rubio against establishment Republicans, including the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, who are backing “Republican in name only” Gov. Charlie Crist.

One of those grassroots conservatives literally shared his two cents with the National Republican Senatorial Committee when it asked him for money. The picture of his protest is priceless:

Michelle Malkin regularly posts images of such “rejected solicitations.” Political activists surely have protested in similar fashion for decades, but their messages are reaching broader audiences thanks to the Internet. Instead of one secretary seeing the protest and tossing it in the trash, thousands of readers are hearing stories that the intended recipients don’t want told.

Hopefully the bad press will awaken organizations to the reality that they had better represent the interests of their donors.

Filed under: News & Politics and People and Photography and Technology
Comments: None

Read The Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report

Posted on 01.04.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 5:35 pm

It’s time for a bit of self-promotion: “Danny Glover is the new editor of the Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report.”

That’s the big announcement in today’s edition of the aforementioned daily newsletter, which tracks all things policy and politics on Twitter for the Beltway crowd.

My friend and new media maven David All launched Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report last month, and I eagerly accepted his invitation to start the new year as its editor. Here’s a snippet from the blurb about my new gig:

The year 2009 marked the emergence of Twitter as a valuable news barometer on Capitol Hill, and with more lawmakers, congressional aides, policy experts and journalists embracing the medium, 2010 promises to be a milestone year in the Twitterverse. I’m thrilled to be starting the year as the new editor of Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report to help chronicle the news for you.

Serving as your editor is a natural outgrowth of my tenure as the author of Beltway Blogroll for National Journal from mid-2005 to early 2008. Just as the blogosphere was an unfamiliar world in official Washington back then, Twitter is now. But Twitter will quickly become just as important and influential in policy and political circles this decade as the blogosphere did in the 2000s. I’m here to try to help you make sense of it all.

If you want to push a policy message, bolster a political brand, float a trial balloon or just comment on the news of the day, you should be doing it on Twitter. But even if you haven’t figured out just how to use the tool yet, you need to be aware of how others inside the Beltway are using it to accomplish their goals. That’s why Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report is here.

While the publication is geared toward people inside the Beltway who don’t necessarily use Twitter themselves, it’s also a useful publication for anyone who wants to keep tabs on the policy and political news in the Twitterverse. If that includes you, please subscribe to the daily e-mail, follow @tweetwatch on Twitter, and spread the word about the publication.

Filed under: Blogging and Government and Media and News & Politics and Technology
Comments: None

Chris Needham Is A Bigot

Posted on 12.24.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 9:44 pm

Save for the name, I used the headline above back in April for a post about actress Janeane Garofalo, but sometimes simplicity, and redundancy, make a point. And Chris Needham of NBC Washington — like Garofalo and others who arrogantly trash rednecks and hillbillies and West Virginians and people in “flyover country” — is a bigot, plain and simple.

Needham typically covers sports but apparently thought it would be a fun journalistic change of pace to cover a completely foreign topic, e-government in West Virginia, and in the process insult an entire group of people — my people.

“West Virginia Discovers the Internet,” he mocked in the headline. He then derided the Mountain State as “our yokel neighbors to the West” and told lies about her people living in “tar-paper shacks,” lacking electricity and “pooping in the backyard.” (Note to Needham: The word “West” isn’t capitalized when it’s a directional reference rather than a reference to the states in the West. We yokels learned that in journalism school at West Virginia University.)

NBC quickly yanked the article, but thankfully, West Virginia native (born and raised just a few miles from my home town, Paden City) and fellow journalist Jacque Jo Bland posted the screen capture linked above on her blog, Girl of Words, for posterity. She also smacked down Needham quite effectively, and considering that Bland and I followed similar paths to where we are today, all I have to say is, “What she said!”:

Someone as poor, disadvantaged, backwards and well, stupid, as me got to the same city you did. Ouch. You didn’t think a place like D.C. hired toothless, cousin-molesting inbreeders from West Virginia, did you?

Oh, and Chris? I’m not the only one. Several of your colleagues in this city are native West Virginians. None of us are too pleased with you right now.
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Filed under: Culture and Hatin' On Rednecks and Media and People and Technology and West Virginia
Comments: 2 Comments

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