Hey y’all! I’m here at Personal Democracy Forum I’ve got a Nokia N95 (thanks, Micah!) and I’m gonna be running around all day talking to folks for GRITtv. Watch live!
And for AlterNet.org, we relaunched the front page to be snazzier and brighter. Design was done by Design About Town, engineering by the ever-smarty Shawn and project management and OCD tweaking by me. Whee!
I redesigned and launched the website for best-selling author Amy Bloom, who has been an absolute riot to work with. I haven’t read her newest, but Come To Me was highly recommended to me by Bitch Magazine co-founder and feminista-extraordinare, Lisa Jervis. And it rocked.
Um, I upgraded to Leopard last night, and so far so good. One thing that I called tech support about because I couldn’t find an answer anywhere else: yes, Time Machine will wipe your external drive the first time you use it, but then you can continue putting other things on it after. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated Time Machine drive, whew.
That’s pretty much it. Holidays are a-comin’ and I’ll be up in Bingotown for a while, hanging out with the fam, and then back in NYC for New Year’s. Hope all’s well in the land of not-my-apartment!
Remember the funniest press release of all time? The final performance was Thursday night, and I’ve got a bunch of pictures and videos from it… watch as John and Dogbowl discuss Nancy Pelosi, perform some hits, talk about the other musician John Hall (who just got elected to Congress), as well as read from his forthcoming book, “Daily Negations.” (Watch the videos here, after the jump.)
In an obvious move marking a new low point in an already declining career, poet and sometimes-musician John S. Hall has released a new book with Soft Skull Press, entitled “Daily Negations,” and will be making two, no doubt poorly-attended, New York appearances.
On Sunday, September 24th, artist Moby’s new music video, “New York, New York” featuring vocals by Debbie Harry, will premiere at Faceboyz Open Mike, one of the longest-running open mikes in the East Village.
I’m much too undercaffeinated to go into much detail, but in the wee hours last night, we relaunched Room Eight, a scoopy-insider-snark-scoop blog on New York politics. I was the designer and CSS tweaker on this one; much thanks to Doug Green of CivicActions for doing the heavy-lifting (and creative problem-solving) of coding. Happy relaunch, Room Eight!
Rather than give the Academy Award speech that I’ve been saving up since I was a toddler, I’ll just give you the link to the website I just launched for The Hightower Lowdown, and the press release:
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George W is doing a heck of a job!
At least, that’s what he says. He reckons our economy is “steady and strong. Steady and strong.”
In the real world, dozens of researchers are keeping track and the Hightower Lowdown has put all their facts and figures into a HANDY DANDY POSTER that spells out what a whopper and a crock’o’ that Bush claim is!
Just a couple of highlights: Last year we bought more goods and services from other countries than they bought from us — $723 billion more, which is an all-time record trade deficit. Bush has cut taxes on people who make $10 million a year by half a million bucks a year each. Meanwhile, 37 million Americans are living in poverty.
Jim Hightower and all of us at the Lowdown, which has 140,000 subscribers, are thrilled to invite you to check out this hot-off-the-keyboards website which features:
* A crisp and clean redesign with our current issue and over seven years of archives online!
* Email alerts from Hightower and the Lowdown!
* Quick and easy ways to send messages to Hightower or anyone else at the Lowdown!
* Places for subscribers to comment on any and every article in the Lowdown!
And — wait, there’s more coming soon! –
* Daily blogs from Hightower and others in the Lowdown camp!
* Local Lowdown events that subscribers can organize and anyone can attend!
* RSS/syndication feeds for the geekily-inclined!
So click out of this email and go check out the NEW ISSUE of the Lowdown on our NEW WEBSITE.
Best from Jim Hightower, Phillip Frazer, Matt Wuerker, Laura Ehrlich, Deanna Zandt, Karen Gifford, Sahu Barron, Gwenda Blair, John Ernst, Bob Siegel, Jackson Frazer, and the whole crew at CivicActions (www.civicactions.com) who built this mighty nifty website.
Sitting in a meeting for work right now — Phillip Frazer, my boss at the Hightower gig, just said about the current state of electoral politics: “The problem is not that we need a third party, the problem is that we need a second party.”
And an old Hightower quote was just resurrected: “Geoge W. Bush is somebody who was born on third base and has gone through life thinking he’s hit a triple.”
One of the guys that hosts this website was at the King Missile show last night, and took the most fantastic pictures. Check out JCN’s Flickr set, and then buzz over to his website chock full of beauties.