I LOVE this show, and think it gets better and better as we wend our way toward the final eps of the season. And the races themselves have become imbued with a quality of sacred ritual: offering grace, humility and cosmic justice to one and all in one swift, brutal event.

Unfortunately, for the horses, this is not turning out so well.

But writing, for me, goes beyond the physical time spent doing it. My work takes up a lot of the space in my head. When I’m walking down the street, doing my “day job” or even talking with people, the “work” is absorbing, bouncing, rejecting, fiddling, tweaking, shooting off sparks from time to time. Often, the first thing I write when I sit down the next day is an idea that occurred to me when I was doing something completely divorced from the book.

So, I was really taken by Anand Giridharardas’ essay in a recent NYTIMES (and here, on his blog):

A New, Noisier Way of Writing | Anand Giridharadas – Columnist and Author of India Calling.

There are no prescriptives here, no easy answers. But he lays out the quandary quite well: how open SHOULD you be about your work, about your opinions, about your thinking. Is the “long thought” still valued, the “considered opinion” still something worth striving for? I think yes (of course! I’m a blogger!)…

What Anand doesn’t address is the condition of most writers — we have day jobs. That’s been the state of things through most of history, and it’s really only in the post WWII era that we’ve developed this “writing industry.” (A recent article in the Atlantic talks about how it might actually be a good thing that writers are involved in the day-to-day world. The constant friction of daily life keeps us from being too other-worldly, too of-ourselves.

The old saying goes: “Journalism is the first draft of history.” More and more, I think social media is the rough draft of history, a step (like my legal pad and pen) before the rough draft. It’s the rough and tumble of the original thought, and I think it may, over the next generation or so, end up becoming a part of the process.

What say you?

Google is looking to sell Motorola Mobility’s set-top box business before it even completes the $12.5 acquisition of the company, according to the New York Post. The search giant has enlisted the services of investment bank Qatalyst Partners and Barclays Capital to help sell the business. This comes a month after news that Cisco is seeking to sell its own set-top box subsidiary, Scientific Atlanta. The report also reveals that two other companies, Pace and Technicolor, are also looking to get out. According to the Post, a big reason for what may be the “slow death” of the set-top box is the introduction of software and devices that can integrate the TV with the web.

As he says

“They’re just flickers of emotion. I think that placing them side by side on infinite loops works best to fully read the reactions of disappointment, bitchiness, feigned cheer and actual cheer.

fourfour: How they lost.

So here’s how our gossip press – the TMZs and the Gawkers of the world – can do their part.

TMZ, Gawker and the like know who the train wrecks are. And they know who’s in the inner circle, who are the hangers on, who’s driving (literally and figuratively) the party bus. (Hell, I’m guessing TMZ has a number of these people on speed dial.)

So let’s remind the entourage of the true cost of what they’re doing. When TMZ’s cameraman is yelling at Whitney or whomever as they stumble out of a club, have them turn to the person who has been with them for 5 nights straight – the one who is helping the whole thing — and say “Hey, what’s your name?

“Because, when they die, I’m gonna show this tape on TV, and then come around to ask you what you did to help.”

Now, I don’t want to hear about journalistic integrity or crossing the line. When it comes to TMZ and Gawker and the like, that ship sailed a lonnnnnng time ago. This is something that I think they could do that would save a life or two.

Just a thought.

On paper it sounds like a project that might be better suited to a video blog, but the critical response to ROOM 237 at Sundance has been borderline obsessive. As New York‘s Bilge Ebiri wrote in his personal blog They Live By Night, “it’s not a film about conspiracy theories; it’s a film about movie love.”

via SUNfiltered | The Sundance Review Revue: ROOM 237.

via Wilco & Popeye – “Dawned On Me” – YouTube.

One person will not be attending — the designated survivor, the guy who will run the country if something catastrophic happens in that room during the speech.

Past Designated Survivors include attorneys general John Ashcroft, Eric Holder and Alberto Gonzales.

Also, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Richardson and Steven Chu.

Imagine the historical possibilities.

FOOLS!!! DAMN FOOLS!!!