timmorgan.com/weblog

Came home tonight, all excited because there was a new Family Guy waiting recorded for me on the DVR. Unfortunately, something messed up and it only recorded the video, but no sound.

You know how hard it is to read lips on a cartoon?

Now before I start, please know that I’m not ranting, just observing. I haven’t been to the rallies. I think that immigrant labor is one of the things that makes America great. If you don’t think that globalization is a good thing then you should move to the country, stop shopping at Wal-Mart or Costco, grow your own food and darn your own socks.

That said.

The Nolensville Road stretch of Nashville is certainly an interesting place. In one shopping mall close to my office, you have a Chinese market, and Indian restaurant, a Mexican meat market, and a Nigerian restaurant. All next to each other. (What percentage of the world’s culinary tastes are NOT represented here?) A few blocks up the street there is an Ethiopian restaurant. (I assume they serve what ever the Red Cross drops off every day.) Outside of the formerly standing Harding Mall there was a restaurant called the “New Country Buffet.” I never ate there because I never figured out which new country the food came from. Then there’s the grandaddy of them all, the K&S; World Market, with all of the signs out front, I swear that one of them is Klingon. Diversity is not lacking in this part of town. You can’t get much more global than this.

So what brought this on? Tonight with dinner, I got change. This is what I was given:

Based on the exchange rate, I made off 1.42134 cents off of the drive-thru guy. Now I’ve demonstrated that it’s a pretty globalized part of town, but who knew that the Nolensville Road stretch had adopted the Euro?

Yesterday I participated in WKRN’s community outreach video training session, Video 101.

Along with WKRN’s other new media efforts, next month they’re going to be moving to the “Vee Jay” concept. No, they’re not going to only show music videos, nor is the sports department only going to highlight golfers from Fiji. The news department will have twice as many folks out doing stories with half the staff. (My math may be incorrect but the idea is right.) They’ll arm their news staff individually with DV camcorders, tripods, and laptops (a map showing unsecured wi-fi locations comes next), rather than use the traditional methods of news gathering. (With a camerman, a reporter,a sound guy, a guy that drives the truck and a guy who gets the donuts.) It’ll certainly be interesting to watch.

The seminar wasn’t directly about that transition, but I’m sure the same techniques we covered were the same given to WKRN’s new VJs. Billed as video training for bloggers, it was more specifically how to take footage that has enough quality and editable aspects for broadcast.

We were encourged to bring video cameras, so I borrowed a friend’s DV camcorder hoping to get some good footage of the seminar. I was hoping to use my newly honed videographer skills to edit together the highlights of the event (complete with snarky commentary) for posting here, but alas, I’ve lost my touch. I’ve done video editing before (warning-quicktime link), but tonight I can’t seem to get the video out of the camera and on to the computer. So I apologize to you, my public. (Firewire? More like Firedwire.)

Rex, Paul, and the as incredible-in-real-life-as-she-is-on-her-blog-Aunt B. have rundowns of what they learned; here are my revelations:

• The MIA Jacob’s Posse boys have officially taken a hiatus from blogging for the summer. As Blogger #1 (or #2, I can’t keep up which is which) told me, “We’re kids and it’s summer.” They’ve learned at 14 the true secret to blogging: Only blog when you’re avoiding legitimate work. It’s summer: no work, no blog. Brilliant, really. (This is evidently the reason that you never hear from Captain T anymore at Thursday Night Fever.)
• News organizations will pay for airable (and sometimes not airable) footage if they need the story. Sometimes they even get into bidding wars. (Just ask Abraham Zapruder.)
• Like me, Aunt B. is left handed.
• The Atlanta Bread Company organizes their sandwiches by internal content and bread type. Once you’ve discovered this you can safely choose your lunch.
• Terry Heaton is a great kisser.
• You can get street legal flashy lights for your SUV. I don’t think you can get a legal siren, but you can always make that “Whooooooo” noise yourself.
• Blake saw that the complementary commemorative T-Shirt read “See Blog Shoot” and immediately brandished his heretofore concealed weapon.
• I was able to pull off an “Uma… Oprah…” moment when I introduced Johnny of “Mr. Johnnypantz” to Aunt B. of TinyCatPants.”
• When trying to get into a house trailer that’s been flipped on its side by a tornado, put your pocketknife away and just grab an axe.

After the seminar those who stuck around were coaxed into a little on camera performance of our own, so expect to see me fumble lines in a Nashville is Talking spot to air soon. You just can’t imagine how your mind goes blank when you’re on TV.

(Thanks to Blake for the picture…)

We got a new shredder in the office. This one comes highly recommended, I see.

This is the part of my office that currently most resembles a Magritte painting.

OK, I’ll admit it, I’ve tried the online dating thing. And I don’t want to brag, but I’ll tell you that I’ve experienced a pretty consistent degree of success. And by consistent, I mean a regular finite amount. And by finite amount, I mean, none.

Now, if you happen to be reading this and I happend to meet you through an online dating service and it didn’t happen to work out: I’m sure that it was me and not you, the chemistry just wasn’t there, I wanted to take a break from dating, the distance between us was too great, difference in our values is too much to overcome, etc., blah, blah, yadda-yadda. Please don’t be offended, I’m just trying to help others. (In other words, I’m asking you to please don’t slash my tires. Again.)

I am by no means an expert, I haven’t tried all of these services, but I’ve been around the block and thought I might share some observations I’ve made as a service to those who are considering taking the plunge:

• e|Harmony.com – From the ads, you would expect this service to be the best. From the price you pay, you would expect personal concierge service with every date. With their advertisements strategically aimed at the sitting-at-home-alone eating-ice-cream-demographic (I saw these ads on Baby Story once. That’s just evil.) and their patented “29 dimensions of compatibility” claim, you would expect their offices would be filled with dozens of server rooms crunching submitted user profiles and a team of Ivy league educated psychologists analyzing the results. As best I can tell from the matches I get, the only factor used in selecting matches is based on a complicated algorithm called, “round-robin.” The other thing I hate about e|Harmony (other than the smugness of Dr. Neil Clark Warren and the pointless use of the “e” and the “|”) is the fact that you can’t be proactive in searching yourself. You’re at the mercy of the computer, um, league office, and you just have to sit and wait for your turn at bat.
• True – This is a relatively new service, they also claim to have a matching service based on 99 “relationship factors” (that’s 70 more than e|Harmony, and that must be better!!) but they also have an added gimmick: CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECKS. From the site: “All members who contact you are screened through the largest database of criminal records on the Internet.” Awesome. But that’s not all…they will PROSECUTE MARRIED PEOPLE if they find out that you’ve signed up for the service and you’ve lied about your marital status. Now, I may be wrong, but if you’ve signed up for this service and the threat of potential legal action played a major factor in you signing up, chances are you might have some trust issues. May not be the best place to go looking for a soulmate. (Especially if you’ve done time and didn’t get that prison marriage annulled.)
• Yahoo! Personals – Hmmm. “We’ve got a search engine, let’s do a dating service.” I think it’s based on the same platform as Yahoo! Autos and Yahoo! Horoscopes. I for one will wait on Google to get in on the action, I can imagine that service would have one button “I’m getting lucky,” press it and a satellite image of your soulmate will appear with directions to her house, important telephone numbers, sexual history, and credit report. Since they already know this about you anyway, it wouldn’t be that much harder to implement.
• Match.com – The dean of online dating services, and my favorite. They make no pretext about it– as says in the title, it’s just a matching service. There are no claims of scientific analysis, you’re responsible for seeking people out, you can get out of it what you put into it. They also keep adding new tools to find people, just a few weeks ago they added a “Who’s been looking at me” feature where you can see who has seen your profile. I like to call ths “stalker mode” but it lets you know who has been poking around in your profile. Great stuff, really.

Now if none of these mainstream sites appeal to you, or you’re looking for someone very specific, there are hundreds of other specialty dating sites out there. For example, MillionareMatch.com (for the wealthy), AbundantLove.com (for the portly), LDSmingle.com (for the Mormons). You get the picture.

I guess all I have left to say is good luck. (And be sure to check out my profile at MatriSearch.Com, the best Indian Matrimonial site I’ve found so far.)

They released what is about the fiftieth final design for the new World Trade Center replacement this morning. Looking over the renderings and the descriptions of the new building, it’s pretty much lost all of the elements, symbolism, and meaning of the orginal Libeskind design.

Personally, I never liked that design anyway. I thought it was a bit contrived, I thought the symbolism of echoing the Statue of Liberty was wrong. (Besides, it just it looked funky.) The twin towers of the orginal World Trade Center had their own symbology, when they were built they were the tallest in the world, a “look at what we choose to do” mentality. “In fact, we’ll build it twice.” It’s that spirit that was attacked when the 9/11 terrorists chose to hit our financial and military centers. (And potentially governmental depending on where the United flight was going). Some say that is an attack on our freedom, but I believe it was more an attack on our will. The September 11 attacks haven’t curtailed our freedom as Americans. Only we can do that to ourselves. What they were attempting to do was frighten us into giving up those freedoms through fear, because they believe us to be weak willed. Will is applied freedom.

What we choose to build back shows what our will has become. What we choose to build back is the legacy of our answer for what happened on September 11.

Now I’m not advocating what Donald Trump has proposed (in a publicity stunt prior to the finale of the Apprentice), building back exactly what was there before–one foot taller. But I do think that this latest design is getting closer to what we need to build. Now, all they have to do is do a copy/move in their cad program, build a second tower and we’ll be on the right track. Remember…We built the Pentagon back exactly like it was. And that was without any debate at all.

But that’s not going to happen. This last redesign was the result of the fear that the building was too close to a major street and thus too accessible to being taken out with a truck bomb. The fact is, whatever we build will be a target. Short of not building anything at all, there’s no way to eliminate all risk, which is what the committee responsible for design (always a mistake) has chosen to be the driving factor. What the project has always needed was a person with the vision and the will to see it through. Currently the only thing providing this leadership is the fear of another 9/11. Perhaps that’s not a fair assessment, because there are hundreds of factors to consider, most notably for this project to work economically people will have to feel safe inside the new buildings.

But I think the economics of this project aren’t as important as getting the symbolism right. If these buildings that we build back sit empty for decades, we still will have said to the world (and the terrorists), “You may try, but our resolve is firm.” The world won’t care about occupancy rates. Just the images they see in the paper.

Both Thursday Night Fever and the Rexblog are reporting what I saw on a sign last night at Starbucks, today is free ice cream day. Unfortunately, when I clicked the link to find out more I was presented with this page:

Now I’m wondering if that means that I have to bring my own cookies to get the free ice cream. Doesn’t seem like such a deal anymore. Or maybe I’m just missing something.