A Note to Our Readers

Hey --

Another week. Hell week. The nightmare edition.

Here's who participated in the writing of this edition:

The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Jess, Ty, Ava and Jim,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz,
and Wally of The Daily Jot

Rebecca's apologized profusely. Rebecca was not the problem. There was a feature she really wanted to do. We did it. Then she said, "I don't know." She preferred it in the print edition. We say, "So?" We've all done that. It was one feature and we've all done that at one time or another. (Except me, Jim, who always pushes for everything to be up here if it's an interesting read.) Rebecca didn't set us behind with that.

She also offered that she might have set us behind due to her new baby (congratulations to Rebecca and Flyboy on the birth of their child last week). Again, no! She didn't set us behind. We worked around it. (We'd basically insisted she not participate this weekend due to having just given birth. She objected and Ava and C.I. immediately raised the issue that if a woman wants to work, she gets to work. End of conversation.)

Rebecca was not the reason for the delay. We thank her and we thank everyone for their help and input and assistance. We thank Dallas for his help with links and with being a soundboard.

Let's talk about what delayed us.

1) Illustrations. Two of mags were a pain in the ass. (In fact, when we finally called it quits and went to sleep, we made a point to upload those. When we woke up less than five hours later, they were still not done uploading on Flickr. They're here and that's thanks to Rebecca and C.I. figuring out another way to get the images outside of Flickr.) The other illustrations were no better. They just would not load. And would not load and would not load. We killed one feature here because of that. It really needed the Condi illustration. You can read C.I.'s "NYT: How Stupid Can Two Men Be & Helene lies again" and "Iraq snapshot" zooming in on the reason Iran's Foreign Minister gave for leaving a dinner as opposed to the US State Department's reason and note that the US press not only backed the State Department, they didn't even offer that the Foreign Minister cited a different reason. So illustrations were a pain in the butt.

2) We have never had so many technical problems. You would have thought we were on dial up the way the pages loaded so slowly -- dial up via dixie cups. After we decided to just start postiong everything and agreed we'd add the illustrations tonight, we still had to wait 20 minutes on average to pull up a page (of already typed text) before we could hit "publish."

3) We got a few features up that way. And then . . . We were kicked out of Blogger/Blogspot by Google. Not a case of page wouldn't load or can't find page. We got an actual message from Google displayed. We'll go into that below.

But those were the problems. Rebecca wasn't the problem.

Let's do the content.

Truest statement of the week -- Betty was the pick last week. This week the pick picked. Betty really wanted Jane Fonda's quote highlighted last week. We agreed it was worth highlighting and the issue is still on sale. Check out the interview, it's worth reading.

Editorial: Don't miss Sir! No Sir! Monday night on... -- The Sundance Channel. We don't imagine we'll do an editorial on a movie again. But Sir! No Sir! is an important documentary. We (rightly) criticize those in small media who maintain a continued silence on war resistance. For that reason, we felt it was our obligation to do all we could to get the word out on an important and amazing documentary.

TV: Mid-wifing the rebirth of the yuppy -- Ava and C.I.'s TV commentary. Excellent e-mailed Lorna who was waiting and waiting this morning and e-mailing and e-mailing. When we decided to bail after the Google message, Ty brought up that Lorna had written repeatedly. Ava and C.I. scanned their hard copy (they write their commentaries out on legal pad) and e-mailed them to her as a PDF. She loved it and has written a lengthy thing on their process (noting cross outs, sentences with arrows to indicate that they should be changed, etc.). She asked if it was okay to share that in Hilda's Mix Tuesday. Hilda was fine with it, so were we. So look for Lorna's analysis of Ava and C.I.'s writing process in Hilda's Mix Tuesday. I'll note (before Mike posts tomorrow that I short-changed Ava and C.I.!) that they really did not know the name of this show. They had a mental block on it. They mention calling friends to find out if it was cancelled yet and not being able to remember the name of the show. It's also true that when I asked Ava on Thursday what they were reviewing, she couldn't remember (and, as Mike noted, threatened to throw her drink at me if I didn't shut up). (Ava points out, "We were a night club blowing off steam. The last thing in the world to talk about was 'What are you two reviewing this weekend?'") This is a really strong commentary and if I weren't tired (if we all weren't tired) I could write more on it. Mike'll outdo me tomorrow. (Private message to Mike: ":D")

The Bwana of Baghdad -- Ty's checking the e-mails and we have a compliment from Joe for the "nice catch" on this. Actually, that was a nice catch by a friend of C.I.'s who came by Saturday insisting we watch the tape.

From the desk of Katrina vanden Heuvel -- This has the most images. The mags are the ones that would never upload on Flickr. Thank you to Rebecca and C.I. for figuring out another way this evening. This was longer in the print edition. Dona did a quick edit after we finally had the mag illustrations.

Jaques-cuse still doesn't get it -- Rebecca did not put us behind. When she pulled the piece she'd fought for from going online (it went out in the print edition), we were already having problems and Dona and I immediately went through the morning papers looking for something. We saw nothing that interested us. Then I saw Jaques in The New York Times. It wouldn't be a group piece but maybe Ava and C.I. could do something? ("Short piece," Dona urged.) By the time they finished this we were still trying to post. There was no delay from Rebecca pulling a piece. (It's a strong piece. And, you probably can guess, it was largely on her giving birth last week. We all enjoyed working on this. )

Screw Google -- Here it is, the message we got from Google. Jess: "I wish we were robots! Robots don't need sleep." This message came up and would not go away. For one hour we tried on various computers, we tried cleaning the cache, we tried everything. We were effectively banned by Google. As Dona says, "That's bullshit." We weren't doing anything different this week so this sudden "They're robots!" crap is just bullshit. We got this to post by e-mailing it. We couldn't get into our account. (If we could have, we would have attempted copy and pasting what we'd typed up and e-mailing them to the site. But no one had the energy to retype.) Cynthia wondered if we were plugging AOL? No. Ty sent that in and used his AOL account. AOL automatically adds that plug at the bottom of their e-mails.

Miss J/O America -- A similar feature ran in the print edition last week. It was killed for the online version because we had a strong theme going. We agreed to address the topic again this week and did so with a short feature.

Ask Dahr -- Two years after Dahr Jamail's reported something, a government report comes out echoing what he's already noted and doing a review of the governmental report is suddenly "news" and "reporting"? We don't think so. He's speaking in the Bay Area Friday night. If you're in the area, make a point to show up.

Highlights -- Mike, Rebecca, Elaine, Betty, Cedric and Wally worked on this. We thank them for it.

That's it. We're exhausted. C.I. still has to do "And the war drags on" over at The Common Ills.
Don't blame us. Blame Google. As slow as it was taking for each page to load, we would have stayed up until every feature posted (we might have left this note unwritten until after we got some sleep). Google banned us. Blame Google.

We'll see you next week.

-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.