clue free

Yes. Barack Obama needs to show off how many (virtual) friends he has by having conversations with dozens of them in public — cyber-yells across the ether. What we would get would be his raw nuggets of wisdom, unfiltered by the Washington machine. What could go wrong? All that filtering and word-crafting is a waste of time when you’re just talking to your Twitter friends. You can trust them. Your enemies are only scrutinizing the old media.

And look, he obviously needs the publicity. It’s not like he’s well-known in… uhhh… well… countries with less than five television sets? Frankly, the mainstream media has done a rotten job creating a cult of personality around the Obamas. There is a danger in going too far with the paper-mâché, though.

Speaking as an honest-to-goodness latte-sipping New York liberal: I am not a big fan of the NY Times, but this may be the most horrible article they have ever published. If this article were posted on any half-decent ‘hobbyist’ message board (one dedicated to cars, or video games, or even cooking), the responses would take only three forms:

• “LOL”
• “nice troll”
• “Never post again.”

Come to think of it, the article may have ended up in the Tech/Lifestyle section because the editors considered it “too embarassing” to include on the Op-Ed page.

P.S. Meditate on the phrase “needs to tweet”. It’s fun. So fun. Needs to tweet.

Tonight, on a very special finding-the-thread edition of Webspotting:

• Books That Make You Dumb correlates and does not causate favorite books with SAT scores (via Facebook, which is the only way to do anything worthy of media attention these days if you’re not using Twitter.)
• Mastodon – Leviathan is a metal record based on Moby Dick. They fill the void in my life — for nerdy-topic thrash — created when Voivod took a dive in their later years. You have to give props to a drummer who will admit on camera that he was the one who approached a bunch of sweaty headbangers and used the phrase, “we should do an album based on Moby Dick.” Also, they do a practically note-for-note version of “The Call of Ktulu” which is not actually “The Call of Ktulu”.
• Connecting the “dumb” and “drummer” themes nicely: Metallica Shreds. Well, they used to.
• Finally, tonight: Moby Dick is my favorite book, and, by delightful co-incidence, is likewise Barack Obama’s favorite book. However, no one has yet done a bad painting of me, and many people have made bad paintings of Barack Obama.