Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

Jeremy Reviews: Tropic Thunder

Apologies that posting has been really light lately.  It may pick up.

I saw Tropic Thunder this afternoon.  First 20 minutes and last 20 minutes are really good.  I kept wanting to fast forward through the hour in the middle.  Having a DVR at home is bad when you go to the movies.  I kept reaching for a remote control that wasn't there.  It's not a bad movie, it's not unwatchable, but the fun of the movie is in the premise -- actors in a war movie in the jungle end up fighting a war in the jungle -- and once we get to the part where they're actually doing the fighting, it's just a war movie, and where's the fun in that?  In this respect, and pretty much every respect, this movie is Galaxy Quest.  The satire of the entertainment industry is very funny, but once we're playing with plot, I could take it or leave it.  Tom Cruise is excellent in his role as the film studio chief, and whenever we're watching the Hollywood side of things, the movie is great.  When we're in the jungle, it's only OK.  Jay Baruchel does a nice job grounding the movie in some sort of reality and being the only character who isn't totally off his gourd.  As far as the press the movie's been getting, about being offensive to all sorts of people, I don't know, it's all done pretty broadly and if you compare this to, say, The Ringer, from a few years ago, that was orders of magnitude more offensive, no question.

Mike Birbiglia: "Sleepwalk With Me"

Saw Mike Birbiglia's one-man show, "Sleepwalk With Me," last night at Upright Citizens Brigade.  He's apparently prepping it for an off-Broadway run in the fall, but why see it for $50 when you can see it for $5 at UCB.  I've blogged about Birbiglia before.  I've seen him perform three other times, I think.  I think he's super funny, and what I like about his stuff as compared with most stand-up comedy out there is that you watch him and you feel like you're getting a sense of him as a person, you feel like you're getting into his head a little bit, you feel like you're watching something authentic and real.  Demetri Martin's stuff (for the most part) has this quality too, although his recent CD, "These Are Jokes," doesn't so much, and I was pretty disappointed by it.

I'd seen what I have to imagine was a very early version of the Sleepwalk show a few years ago at UCB in New York, when I went to their Monday night stand-up showcase once (called Crash Test) and Birbiglia was the surprise guest and he told a crazy story that didn't sound entirely true about a sleepwalking adventure that I won't spoil because it's the core piece of the new show.  That was a twenty-minute story, and it's now been built out to this 80-minute "Sleepwalk With Me" show, with much more to it as far as the story itself and the set-up and the asides and the emotional heft of the whole piece.

So he's clearly been working on this thing for a while, and it all feels very carefully honed, very deliberately put together -- there are some bits, especially toward the beginning, that are pulled from other material of his that I'd heard before, either on stage or on CD, but what I think Birbiglia is unusually good at is making material he's performed a thousand times before still feel fresh  and new and real (which makes his CDs a pretty solid repeat listen, actually) and most of that fit in seamlessly and didn't feel lazy or anything... and the bits and digressions fade more and more into the background as he gets deeper into the core story of the piece...

It's hard to talk intelligently about the show without giving things away, which I really don't want to do... but I guess what surprised me is that part of what makes Birbiglia appealing on stage is that you want to root for him, he seems like a good guy, he's self-effacing on stage, he's likeable... and for the first two-thirds of the show, I was totally with him, I was totally on his side, I was really, really enjoying the show and was really impressed with the craft of it, honestly.  I kept looking over at my fiancee (who's out in LA for the next few weeks doing a med school rotation in the UCLA hospital system -- it's awesome to have her out here and to get to not be long-distance for a little while, but that's fodder for another post entirely) to see if she was laughing (she's heard one of Birbiglia's CDs, but going to this thing was my idea, not hers, and I wanted her to like it, and hoped she would, and was also curious what was hitting her as funny as someone who hadn't heard most of this material before, since I'd heard a bunch of the pieces before in different forms and so it wasn't all completely fresh to me) and she was, and overall the audience really seemed to be with him... and then there's a moment two-thirds of the way in, when he admits something that makes him seem like a little less of a good guy, and actually kind of a jerk, in a way that he doesn't come across at all on stage... and I think he was trying to really hard to stay just on the side of the line where you're still rooting for him, you're still on his side... but I'm not sure he did.  He definitely lost my fiancee at that point, and I think he lost a decent chunk of the audience.  He lost me a little bit, and I wanted to be on his side, I really did.  And he almost got me back by the end -- but, I don't know.  I think to some degree this is the feeling he's trying to provoke -- he's trying to see how far he can go and still keep the audience on his side -- but that moment, the moment when the story turns that one extra tick, it's like the air goes out a little bit, and I wonder if he's still working on calibrating it exactly right.  On the other hand, it's sort of cool to play with the idea of still being able to be funny when the audience isn't quite sure whether or not it's still on your side.

In any case, highly recommended, very very funny, and -- maybe even better than that -- spent the entire car ride home talking about it, and about audience expectations of comedy, and whether you have to always be on the comedian's side, and talking about the real-life stuff that he shared in the show.  But mostly it's very very funny and totally, totally worth seeing, whether for $5 at UCB or $50 elsewhere.

And, I discovered in my Google Reader when I got home, there was an excerpt from the show on This American Life over the weekend, and you can listen to it here.  It's the first big story in the episode but doesn't start until a few minutes in.

"Must Love Kids" on TLC

I'm a little bit ashamed of what I'm watching on TV these days.  I feel like I've really hit the bottom of the barrel when I'm watching things that don't even have their own threads on Television Without Pity.  I've been watching this reality dating show on TLC called "Must Love Kids," where 3 single mothers are each thrown half a dozen guys to meet, and they're going on dates with them and introducing them to their kids, and whittling the numbers down, slowly.

This is a sad show.  But not for the reasons I initially thought it would be.  I actually don't think the biggest problem is that it's reprehensible parenting -- sure, it's probably not terrific to throw your kids on a reality TV show, or to introduce them to all these guys who want to date you, but I'm assuming any woman going on this show is probably dating a whole bunch in real life anyway, so these kids are probably meeting a lot of weird guys they never see again and are used to it already, and at least the producers are hopefully screening these guys to make sure they aren't serial killers.  And I can imagine that single mothers who want to meet someone would find it frustrating to go through normal channels and keep finding out that the guys they meet aren't interested in someone who already has kids.  But what's sad about it is the guys, kind of.  They show these clips of awkward dates where the two people have nothing to say to each other, and there's clearly no connection, the woman is saying "he just kept talking, and we didn't really have much of a connection at all," they show clip after clip of the guy talking and talking and the woman yawning and clearly bored, and then cut to the guy: "we had such a great connection, I thought she was great and we really bonded and I'm really looking forward to another date."  And I'm sure it's all in the editing, but they're just making these guys seem so horribly desperate -- and subjecting themselves to this competition where the winner gets to date a woman who cares so much about her kids that she's throwing them on a reality TV show.  Yay.  And most of the guys are coming off as just a little creepy, and when you throw kids into it the show just... I don't know, I'm creeped out and saddened when I watch it.  I'm sad for these women who are so desperate to find someone that they're going on a reality show to do it -- because it's not a glamorous show like The Bachelor, and being on a TLC reality show isn't catapulting anyone to Hollywood stardom, and one of the mothers has this sad-looking apartment, and I just feel bad for them.  And for the guys.  And for the kids.  And for the camera crew that has to film this.

And maybe this is way too judgmental, and I'd think differently if I were 10 years older and single and didn't think wanting to be on a reality TV show was in and of itself indicative of some sort of character flaw.

In other TV news, after reading the articles about Estelle Getty's death I decided to DVR a few Golden Girls episodes and just watched the two-parter where Rose has a heart attack and is in the hospital and found myself tearing up quite a bit because Betty White reminds me of my grandma and I'm still sort of mourning her stroke and the loss of a good bit of herself.  Although of course feeling lucky and grateful that she's doing as well as she is.  But it's still hard.

The All-Star Game

I should have live-blogged the All-Star Game.  Peter Abraham of the Journal News did.  It's terrific.  That was an awesome, awesome, awesome All-Star Game.  I was rooting for it to go until someone's arm fell off.  Still, really awesome, and totally stopped me from accomplishing anything tonight (but without feeling bad about it, since the game was amazing), which was the added side bonus.

"Lawyer Boy" by Rick Lax

Wanted to give a quick plug to a just-released law school memoir called "Lawyer Boy," by Rick Lax.  Amazon link here.  The book's a funny account of Lax's 1L year at DePaul -- he just graduated this May -- and covers all the standard 1L stuff: taking the LSAT, orientation, professors, exams, legal writing class, 1L boat cruise, studying, grades, etc.   Lax sent me an advance copy -- it's a solid read, I liked it a lot.  Recognized a lot of my own experiences in there, no surprise that it's pretty much the same everywhere.  But Lax does a really nice job of making the legal stuff -- classes, cases, concepts -- funny and accessible, and he throws in a few magic tricks (besides being a law student, he's a magician), there's a sort-of-love-story in there, a healthy look at the insanity of many of his classmates, a couple of comic strips and diagrams... it's all totally readable, especially for someone thinking about law school or getting ready to start in the fall, and especially if you've already bought them a copy of Anonymous Lawyer.  :)

Recommended.  And I don't say that about most things I read.

Lax's website is here if you want more info.

Random Links

Sorry I haven't written in a while.  Finished up a script I've been working on, on Monday, and haven't had too much interesting going on since I guess. 

Watched the U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials on TV yesterday, just flipped it on while eating lunch, and found it a lot more interesting than I expected.  Was really kind of taken by the human interest stories -- these 13 or 14 gymnasts, training all of their lives for the Olympics, and six make the team and the rest don't... and their lifelong dream is pretty much done, since it's not like there's an Olympics every year, and the window of opportunity is pretty small.  One of the gymnasts, Raj Bhavsar, was named as an alternate in 2004 and it really crushed him, he took a couple of years off, but then came back and was making a real push to make the team this time... the scoring system at the trials -- they had to explain this a few times -- is that if a gymnast finished in the top 2 overall, and in the top 3 in at least 3 of the 6 events, he was a "lock" and automatically made the team.  And the rest of the team would be chosen completely at the discretion of some U.S. Olympic committee.  Bhavsar came really really close to qualifying as a lock -- mere tenths of a point away, based on a tiny hop at the end of his last landing on floor exercise.  And I felt really bad for him while watching -- he seemed like a nice guy, seemed like after his failure to make it in 2004, right on the cusp, this would be his year.  And then when he missed qualifying as a lock yesterday -- no one ended up meeting the criteria, so the whole team was picked by the committee -- I assumed he'd be a shoo-in to be picked, since he was so strong in most of the events.  But then they announced the team today -- and again he's an alternate!  His profile on the telecast was really effective TV -- made me feel really bad for him!  In any case, here's a NY Times profile of Bhavsar, and then an article about him not making the team this afternoon.  I expect this is just a fleeting interest in watching Olympic coverage, since I've never really gotten into it before, and I tried to watch some diving coverage this afternoon but it put me to sleep on the couch very very quickly.

The other day I watched a British documentary called Mum and Me, about a woman who filmed her mother's struggle with Alzheimer's.  The mother lives in a nursing home, and the daughter would visit every few weeks and bring the video camera.  Two articles about it here and here.  It was a very sad film.  The mother was in good spirits for the most part, but didn't really know what was going on.  I thought it was perhaps in poor taste to keep dwelling on the mother soiling herself in various places.  Once would have been enough to make the point, I think.  But it was a compelling film, worth watching although probably not right before bed, since I think it gave me some un-fun dreams.

Cool Newsweek article about accurate political prognostications being made by Nate Silver, who developed the PECOTA baseball projection system for Baseball Prospectus.  I was in a fantasy baseball league with Silver for a year, but never met him.  I think Baseball Prospectus does pretty great work, and I think it's cool that he's been able to translate his system into another field.  I expect Nate's probably a really smart guy who'll end up doing a bunch of neat things before too long.

I've been told this Vanity Fair article about Cuban Baseball (written by Michael Lewis) is a must-read, but it's been in my browser window for a week and I still haven't read it.  So check it out, maybe.

I'm getting way too into the wedding web page that I've assigned myself to make.  My fiancee gets to deal with the fun stuff like checking on caterer prices, while I do the real work like writing photo captions.  :)

 

In The Heights

Just watched the Tony Awards.  The creator/writer/star of In The Heights (which won best musical) went to my high school.  We were in a chorus together at some point, but didn't really know each other.  Pretty cool though.  My high school's kind of a Tony Award factory lately -- one of the Avenue Q writers went there too.  Haven't seen In The Heights, but I've been listening to the soundtrack the past few days and think it's pretty impressive.  I'll see it at some point, I'm sure.  In any case, pretty cool stuff for a 28-year-old and his first musical.  Pretty cool.

A few links

Just so I can clear them out of my browser, and since I wanted to share 'em:

Great interviews with Albert Brooks and Robert Smigel.

Videos of Stephen Colbert's Princeton graduation speech.  Here and here.

Cool free things you can do on your cell phone (like Google texting).

Sex and the City

I saw the Sex and the City movie yesterday.  With someone who liked it more than I did.  :)

It's hard for me to understand why people are enjoying this movie.  It's all very unhappy.  The characters are all very unhappy, their friends don't really seem to ever make them feel better, and the point of the story seems to be that love is the ultimate goal, because being single is terrible, but, wait, love is terrible too, because men are terrible, and so every option is terrible, and so life is just terrible regardless.  But at least you can laugh when your friend has diarrhea and can't get to a bathroom in time.  I have no objection to potty humor -- there's potty humor in most of the things I write -- but here it's just a bizarre choice for the writer to make.  This is the funniest thing you can come up with?  You have a world of opportunities here, you can set up any sort of funny, clever, relatable scenario you want, and you're going to spend real time in your movie dealing with the comedy of diarrhea?  There are movies where the juxtaposition of highbrow and lowbrow humor work.  This is not one of them.  This is a writer making stupid choices.

It's not just about the random potty humor.  What frustrated me the most about the movie is that it's built on completely shoddy plot-work.  Both of the main storylines -- I'm trying not to spoil here -- are the kinds of things that could easily be resolved in five minutes.  If I was desperate to talk to someone and she wasn't picking up her phone, it might cross my mind that maybe she doesn't have her phone with her.  Or that the ringer's turned off.  And so I might call someone else she knows -- like, maybe one of the three friends permanently attached to her side -- and try to reach her that way.  Or I might actually try to find her in person.  You know, instead of doing something that will obviously screw things up irreparably.  (And, similarly, if I were the girl, maybe I'd take a deep breath and try to figure out what's going on before I start doing dramatic and drastic things.  You know, because I'm not a three-year-old.)  So we have two people who actually do want the same thing, and love each other, but we need unbelievable plot machinations to keep them apart for a couple of hours -- literally, a couple of hours.  This is the slowest moving plot engine ever.  The movie feels like it's twelve hours long, and that's pretty much how long it actually is.  The other main storyline?  How about throwing the viewer a few more details so we can really understand what the transgressions was, and let us see them fight about it instead of just pulling them apart.  Characters who are kept away from each other and not allowed to address problems are, to me, less interesting than characters who have to deal with things.  Two hours of keep-away does not make for a fun movie.  To me.  Two hours of "let's distract the audience with poop jokes and fill time before we actually address what's going on with the characters" is a pain to sit through.

But all this is nitpicky, because it assumes I actually cared what was going on with the characters, and I didn't.  These are four unpleasant people, living unpleasant lives, and treating each other -- and the cardboard-cutout men in their lives -- fairly unpleasantly.  They also don't do anything besides complain to each other.  No one works, no one engages in any activities at all, no one has any responsibilities, no one has any family members, and no one goes to the bathroom except the one who poops in her pants.

This movie has nothing real to say about anything.  It has nothing real to say about women, men, love, work, money, sex, New York City, modern society, culture, or diarrhea.  It is a waste of a writer's opportunity to have a point of view, to add something to the world, to be funny or interesting or compelling or even just entertaining.  To actually bother trying to make a good movie.  This is a purely commercial play -- how much money can we make selling garbage to an existing audience that will go see a Sex and the City movie regardless of whether it's any good.  I can't fault them for making it, or releasing it, or promoting it, because clearly there is this audience for it, and it's earning an incredible amount of money.  But it's stupid, and way too long, and seriously lacking.

End of rant.

Spelling Bee

The National Spelling Bee is on ESPN this morning and then ABC for the final rounds tonight.  I'm Tivoing it because I won't be home, which is probably really dorky.  There's an online test on the website, which is pretty fun.   (I scored a 23.)

I've blogged about this before, but I may as well again.  In fifth grade I qualified for the district spelling bee, but was knocked out on the word halibut, which I thought was kind of unfair for a 5th grader, since it's not like I was in the habit of purchasing fish on my own.  I spelled it halibit.  Because that's how the judges pronounced it.  Because they were evil.  And, from how my family tells it, I was quite inconsolable afterwards.  The winning word in that bee was refrigerator.  Which was a very, very, very easy word in comparison, I thought at the time.  I have eaten halibut only once since then, and only because it was at a wedding and there was no alternative choice.  Well, okay, I guess I had a choice not to eat it.  But I ate it.  And it ruined my ability to honestly say I've never eaten halibut since spelling it wrong in the spelling bee.  And so I wish I hadn't eaten it.  Even though the taste was unobjectionable, if I'm being completely honest.

UPDATE 11:55AM -- after watching the first hour of coverage on ESPN, I'll call my pick for the winner -- Easun Arunachalam.  Seemed the most confident so far.  He's one of the youngest but seems to have skipped a grade or two (an 11 year old 7th grader).

Top Chef

I can't BELIEVE they sent Dale home instead of Lisa.  I think Dale is the first reality TV contestant I've felt really bad for post-elimination -- he so clearly seemed the better chef and the better person.  Of course, not like we have any idea what the food really tastes like... but still -- I was so rooting for him to win the whole thing.

Also, regular readers may recall I called David Cook as the American Idol winner weeks and weeks ago.

So I'm 1 for 2.

I would try and call the winner of something else, but there aren't any other reality shows I watch.  Except "The Paper" on MTV, but there are no winners there.  Have I blogged about "The Paper"?  You should check it out.  It's good stuff.

Brothers and Sisters

I can't believe they totally reversed course and made Rebecca not a Walker anymore.  It's like the Landry murder plot from Friday Night Lights.

Liveblogging the first 53 minutes of the Presidential Debate

8:01 -- I think Charlie Gibson should wear his glasses.  I like him better with his glasses.

8:05 -- I am really bored by these opening statements.  Really I'm bored by the race, and have been for quite a while.  Obama, Clinton, I'm kind of over it.  One of them will be the nominee, and I think this thing has gone on for so long that I don't really care which one.  That's probably a bad way to feel about it.  And I'm sort of hoping this debate will snap me out of it and get me re-excited about at least one of them.  But so far I still really don't care.  Maybe after the commercial break, I will care again.  If I don't care by 9:00, I'm going to watch the American Idol results show, because I do sort of care who wins that one.  Sadly.

8:07 -- Why are they wasting time with quotes from the Constitution?  Anyone who cares already knows the Constitution.  Of course, Clinton and Obama's standard stump speeches are starting to feel just as old as the Constitution.  I'm glad Gibson put his glasses on.

8:08 -- Good for Obama for volunteering to talk first here.  It's a silly question about running mates, because everyone knows their answers are not going to be revelatory.  "It's too early to talk about running mates when we don't have a nominee yet...."

8:09 -- I think Obama's people gave him a sleeping pill before the debate.  He seems a little unfocused and low energy, more than I've seen him in the past.

8:10 -- Stop quoting from the Constitution.  Or at least if you're going to do that, pull out some big piece of parchment or something like that, make it a whole big spectacle.

8:11 -- Clinton took that same sleeping pill.  They are so much more fun when they're fighting.  Calm candidates debating is boring, especially since they agree with each other about absolutely everything.

8:12 -- These questions are really long.

8:13 -- "wedge issues" -- I like that term, but have no idea what it means.

8:14 -- Clinton: "I am the granddaughter of a mill worker..." -- wait, is she John Edwards?  I'm very confused.  I haven't heard about her mill worker before.  I really think my TV is only playing this debate back at about 85% speed, they're both really low energy.

8:16 -- Clinton is not answering this question about whether Obama can beat McCain, but why should she.  I hope they press her on actually giving an answer to the question asked, but I bet they won't.

8:17 -- Oh, they did press her!  And she said yes, she thinks Obama can win.  Okay, and he thinks she can win.  Great.  But does anyone else think either of them will win if this thing goes on forever and they both die of exhaustion?

8:21 -- Clinton -- "my passion for empowering people" -- is this new?  I haven't heard about that yet.

8:23 -- These questions are so long!  I don't personally care that much about this Jeremiah Wright stuff.  Maybe I should.  I don't know.

8:24 -- I am really looking forward to the upcoming health care discussion, which I'm sure is coming, and I'm sure will be exactly like it was in all the other debates.

8:28 -- Lots of this Reverend Wright stuff.

8:32 -- Ooh, people don't think Clinton is honest and trustworthy.  I wonder if she'll respond by saying she is honest and trustworthy!

8:33 -- Wait, what -- "I said some things that I knew were not in keeping with what actually happened."  That is an AWESOME way to say "I lied" without anyone realizing you just said it!  "Unfortunately, on a few occasions, I was not as accurate as I had been in the past."  Again!  Did she write these things out beforehand?  Those are great.

8:41 -- I haven't heard anything about this guy who bombed things being Obama's friend.  I think I tuned out for a second -- did this guy bomb something, or just make a statement supporting people who bomb things?  I guess he didn't actually bomb things.  Yeah, okay, he just talked about wishing bombers set more bombs.  That's a little bad.  I can't decide whether Obama is doing a good job or a bad job.  I am so bored by this debate.  This is really really boring.  And I suspect that if they want to get into a "whose friends suck more" debate, Clinton's friends aren't awesome either.

8:44 -- Is Obama getting angry?  Ooh, maybe this will get interesting.  Or maybe it will remain boring.

8:45 -- Maybe they will come back after their commercial break, but I'm not so sure I will.  Gosh.  Okay, I will, but I think I will be asleep before this is over.  Is anyone else watching this?

8:47 -- Man, what happened to Indians pitcher CC Sabathia?  This is his third straight terrible start.  Yes, I'm using the commercial break to check baseball scores.

8:48 -- Why are they bothering to advertise the sleeping pill Lunesta during the debate?  The debate probably works even better.  Actually, no, this makes sense -- anyone still watching this probably needs
a sleeping pill.  Also, I want some free granola from Kashi.  I think I'll go to Kashi.com and sign up.

8:51 -- Kashi's website is slow to load.  I guess everyone else wants their free granola too.

8:52 -- I'm giving up.  The Kashi commercial made me hungry, and I don't want to watch this anymore.  Sorry.  I'll leave it on in case anything interesting happens and blog some more.

Blogging Kills

Or so the New York Times says.  This is a very stupid article.  The headline:

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

Oh, wow, this must be quite an epidemic for the Times to decide it's newsworthy.  Bloggers dying in front of their computers, by the dozen, after days without sleep.  Young, otherwise healthy, active people, dropping dead, in this "web world of 24/7 stress," distinguished from the ordinary world where jobs are not stressful at all, and no one demands anything from them, right?  Even before we get to the rest of the article, I wonder -- is blogging really that special, as far as stressful 24/7 jobs?  In fact, I would venture to say that being a fireman, or an emergency room physician, or even a big firm lawyer tethered to the office via BlackBerry -- those are probably all more stressful than sitting at a desk and blogging.  And in terms of the 24/7-ness of the job, most blogs I read don't post all night.  I'm trying to picture a "blogging emergency" that might create middle-of-the-night stress for bloggers, but not for other people.  Anyway, even if I accept that blogging is stressful... let's see what this epidemic looks like...

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Oh.  Two middle-aged guys had heart attacks.  And they were both bloggers.  Well, obviously there's a link.  Let's stop for a second and do something the Times didn't.  Look at actual data.  How many bloggers are there?  Let's err on the conservative side and say there are a thousand people blogging.  That's probably low -- even if we're just counting people who are blogging for a living, writing dozens of posts a day, I can probably name a couple hundred active blogs pretty easily, and there are lots I don't know of.  But I really want to be conservative with my estimate here, just to highlight how stupid this article is.  So if there were a thousand bloggers, how many would probably die over the course of a few months just by chance?  Looks like a little under one percent of people die every year (825 per 100,000).  Skewed toward older people, obviously.  But these guys who died weren't that young.  For a 60 year old man, the death rate is 1.4% per year.  For a 50 year old man, it's 0.6% per year.  By chance, some bloggers are going to die every year.  There's no way these two people dying is statistically significant.  So surely there must be something else linking their deaths to blogging, right?  Otherwise there's no article here.  Right?  Anything?

There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. 

Oh.  Oops.

So, two middle-aged guys died of heart attacks.  And they were both bloggers.  Amazing: blogging causes death.

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen."

Or maybe nothing will happen.  Or maybe you should get some exercise and hire some more employees so you can sleep.  Or try to lose some weight.  Just because you are a blogger, doesn't mean you can't be healthy too.  This is really silly.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

This is really silly too.  You write for the New York Times -- can't you do better than this sentence?  "I have no idea how many people blog for pay, so instead of trying to figure it out, I'm going to make a random guess, and support it with nothing."  How about looking on Technorati to see how many blogs there, about the kinds of things that would require someone "on call" to post all day, and that have enough of a readership to justify paying someone to blog.  According to Truth Laid Bear -- and this is taking me eight seconds of research -- if you sort by blog traffic, once you get down to blog #1000, you're looking at about 2500 readers a day.  That's not that many, probably not enough to be able to make nearly enough money to pay someone to blog for you.  And looking at some of those blogs, it's pretty clear they're not the kind of things causing 24/7 stress on their writers.  Even if this ranking is incomplete, I think it's probably a real stretch to say there could be tens of thousands of bloggers blogging for pay.  Actually, I think my conservative estimate of a thousand may not actually be that conservative after all.  But in any case, at least I'm trying to justify an estimate using some kind of data.  The Times just guessed.  I have no idea how a sentence like that -- "unclear... surely... maybe..." makes it into print, honestly.  There are ways to estimate this.

Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.

This is a stupid sentence too.  Millisecond?  No.  And blogs may have fickle audiences, but bloggers aren't breaking scoops by the millisecond, and even if I'm reading a blog in part for the timeliness of its posts, writing counts for something, and how many people are really cutting a blog off their RSS feed because it doesn't update at 4 in the morning?  This is a ridiculous way of thinking about blogs and why people read them.

Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled — by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

Can we really blame blogging for the fact that he doesn't eat proper meals?  Unless he's actually blogging his stream of consciousness, 24 hours a day, non-stop, he has time to make a sandwich.  I mean, where does he get the coffee?  How does he go to the bathroom?  Making food doesn't take hours.  If he is choosing not to eat, that's fine, but it's not the fault of his job.  People with more stressful jobs than blogging find time to eat.  Sorry.

For his part, Mr. Shaw did not die at his desk. He died in a hotel in San Jose, Calif., where he had flown to cover a technology conference.

Oh, no wonder we're blaming blogging.  Gosh, what a useful article.

Opening Day

I watched way too much baseball today.  The MLB Extra Innings free preview week is actually the biggest reason I don't buy the Extra Innings package -- having all the games available for a week shows me how much I'd watch if I had them all year, and scares me into not subscribing.  I did subscribe back in 2001, when I lived in Texas, worked for a software company, and since I actually had a job in an actual office, I didn't have to feel guilty if I watched more baseball games than I should have when I came home.  Then again, in the 18 months I lived in Texas, I probably wrote more than I've written in any eighteen-month period since.  Ah, the productivity fueled by loneliness, boredom, and the crushing unachieved ambitions of a kid right out of college who absolutely couldn't convince himself that all he was meant to do was work in marketing for a software company in Texas.  Boy, that feels like a long time ago.  Sort of.  Yet as I think about it, I've kind of taken a seven-year journey back to a very similar emotional place.  Hmmm.  I should fix that.  I'm not sure I know how.  This post is becoming cryptic.  Sorry.  Let me sort out what I mean in my head first and maybe I'll blog more about it tomorrow.