As Jamie noted in an e-mail Thursday, "No roundtables for awhile must mean we'll finally get 'Mailbag' back." Yes, Jamie, it does. Answering and commenting are 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, Ruth of Ruth's Report, Wally of The Daily Jot, and Marcia SICKOFITRDLZ.
Ty: First up, Roger e-mails a story he wants linked to and wants it noted that he e-mails the public account of The Common Ills "several times a week and I never get anything linked to and I never get a response."
Jess: I'll grab that. There are many people e-mailing the public account each week. Roger's got a bit of gossip that he's sending this site. If he's sending it to The Common Ills, that's why it's not getting noted there. That and the fact that it's not Iraq related. I work the public account along with C.I., Ava, Eli, Martha, Shirley and Dona. It takes that many of us because there's that much mail. There is an automated response that goes out. That is all you will probably get. There's not time for replies. Roger has labeld his e-mail to this site "Top Secret." That's the easiest way to not be read. If I see that in the public account at The Common Ills, I immediately delete it -- not sure I have the security clearance needed to read it. "Top Secret" and similar headings are also very popular headings for junk e-mails. If it looks like junk mail, we don't bother to open it. We don't open attachments either. C.I. can go through -- reading -- 100 e-mails really quick. I can't. Others can't. The policy is if it looks like junk mail, don't even bother to open it, just delete it. If you're not sure, open it if you want to, otherwise leave it and someone else will open it at some point. Anything with the words "Call Me" in the heading is deleted because none of us have time to call you. "Treat as urgent" goes in the trash because, even if it's not junk mail, we'll assume the "urgency" has passed before we got to it.
Dona: If I can jump in on this, a number of people are inviting C.I. to things lately. I don't know where they think the time would come from, but there's no time for it. I delete all of those. I do not respond. "From the desk of" is always junk mail and always gets deleted. So is "Your account is about to be deleted" allegedly from Yahoo but I had a good laugh at the request for personal information in one of those last week that meant to use a generic address but was actually a 'name.'
Ava: I have to add that the best e-mail that went into the trash immediately upon my reading it was from a man who offered C.I. a job being the nanny to his children. I did not reply. I also delete anything with "Only you can save me" assuming that, if it is true, your goose is already cooked. It's also true that some things go into the "SPAM" folder automatically. If it goes in there, it's usually never read. C.I. checked it on Thursday and found a thing on David Bacon, a thing on Bill Moyers Journal and I forget what else. Most of the time, it is never checked and Yahoo automatically deletes that stuff after a few days.
Ty: Next up is Kimber who wants to know why there isn't (a) more theme editions and (b) more music features?
Jim: Theme editions require planning ahead of time. If you've read for any length of time, you've guessed that is not our strong suit. Ignoring this feature only, this edition may qualify as a theme edition because Dona, Betty and C.I. roughed it out early, early Saturday morning and came up with a list of topics. We've stayed with that list and are actually moving along fairly quickly.
Cedric: In terms of music, we all love music, but there's usually not time. If we could go back to Dona's goal -- a mixture of long and short features, we could probably do another.
Ty: Spezel K e-mails wanting to know why we haven't discussed the new Ralph Nader book entitled --
Jess: Stop. Don't name it. No offense to the author of the book. We went over this topic last week in "Roundtable." Repeating, until Nader announces whether he is or is not running for the Green Party nomination for president, we're not mentioning him, we're not mentioning the Green Party. My party is being held hostage by Nader's indecisiveness. I'm not in the mood for it. He's on Meet the Press today on NBC. Hopefully, he'll make an announcement. If he doesn't and he hasn't announced by this coming Friday, you may find a feature on this topic next week.
Betty: Just to add, we all read that book this month and were planning to do a book discussion. I assume we'll at least give it a shout out at some point. But the topic is off limits until an announcement is made. Count me as among the offended for Cynthia McKinney that her run is in a hold pattern while Nader decides what he wants to do.
Ty: B4021 e-mailed and I'm going to answer it. He notes we mentioned a feature before Christmas on Joshua Key but had to put it on hold. Where is it, he wonders and the answer is that it was a creative piece. With the writers strike, that put it on hold further. It was going to be in screenplay form and we weren't going to do that during the writers strike. We may do it at a future date. B4021 also wants noted he shared C.I.'s belief that Brian DePalma's wonderful Redacted wouldn't get a nomination due to the "cheap shennanigans" on the part of the company releasing the film and that DePalma did not get nominated. He writes, "C.I. is two-for-two because when the nominations were announced, the press referred to Tommy Lee Jones' nomination for as a surprise. C.I. said it was happening." C.I. didn't just say that, C.I. actively campaigned for it, just to put that in. It wasn't a prediction, it was a given to those supporting that nomination. That's offline. Online, C.I. wrote November 10th, "The only other sure thing nomination wise this year is Tommy Lee Jones' nomination for Best Actor In the Valley of Elah -- a film that is general release." Somewhere later, C.I. notes that DePalma's film is out due to the company's treatment of it. I provide the Tommy Lee Jones link because my boss pinned that to the office bulletin board and highlighted it. It was quickly moved to the top of the bulletin board and underneath it clips declaring the nomination a "suprise" last month. Those included Entertainment Weekly, MTV, Canada.com, and far too many to mention. Every time my boss found something online he printed it up, every time he found something in the paper, he clipped it. There is now a huge stack of papers, pinned to each other, underneath C.I.'s statement.
C.I.: Just to be clear, DePalma should have been nominated. I also worked on that and it didn't come off. The feeling wasn't about DePalma, the ill will, or the film. People were outraged by the way he and the film were treated and the consensus was that no one wanted to see anyone from the film company showing up at the podium or in the press after claiming credit. It's similar to the way Mask was shut out not due to what was onscreen but due to the post-filming news. When that reaction became the norm, I continued advocating for the film but it was obvious that the company had destroyed it's Oscar chances. DePalma directed a great film.
Ty: Agreed. Tyrese writes that he is "a 20-year-old who is a proud member of the Communist Party and I wanted to be sure that you all knew I got the point being made the last two weeks. The issue isn't 'Oh, scary Communists!' The issue is how lame it is for people to hide who they are. I agree with you 110%. I think it's one of those elphant in the room issues that everyone avoids and they're not doing any favors. Thanks for highlighting Workers World in the snapshots lately." He's referring to noting Dee Knight's Workers World piece in the snapshot after the announcement for Iraq Veterans Against the War's Winter Soldier Investigation.
C.I.: March 13th through 16th. In DC.
Ty: Laraine writes that she fears the announcement of roundtables being put on hold for the immediate future means no book discussions.
Jim: Like Betty noted, a book we had planned to discuss by now got put on hold. That wasn't due to the roundtables being put on hold. However, it is true that we're not rushing to do a lengthy discussion piece at present.
Marcia: I was talking to Dona and telling her, "You know, I don't have to participate." I mean, I know that the more people included, the longer the thing will be.
Dona: And that's something everyone brings up at some point other than the core six -- Jim, Ty, Jess, Ava, C.I. and myself -- and Betty, Kat and Rebecca. That's because they've been participating the longest with us. Ruth's brought that up, Mike, Cedric, Wally, Elaine, even Trina when she's participated. I'd actually love it if that was the problem because then the answer would be reduce the number or do two roundtables for an edition where we broke up into two groups. That's not the problem. The problem is defocusing and wasting time. In terms of last week, my hands are clean but I've wasted time before. It's really easy to do because we all love each other and we all love talking. Before you know it, something that was going to be a quick comment has eaten up 30 minutes. I don't know what the answer is at present but I do know that it's not in reducing the number of people participating.
Kat: This is not an insult to Jim who is moderator of the piece. He can force a topic and discussion when it's needed and that's a strong point. He can do a lot of strong things. But the roundtables I've participated in that have worked quickly and were focused, it's really just one, the December 2006 one that Ava and C.I. moderated. They did that by not just compiling a list of possible topics but by asking after the list was made, "How married are you to this topic?" Then they narrowed it down further. They didn't go with, as we did last week, "Green Party" as a topic. Now Jess and Rebecca and I knew what that meant and probably everyone did. But if we had a topic, we were asked to be specific. The roundtable also moved quickly because Ava and C.I. tossed to people specifically with others adding in.
Jim: I think those are good points and they were echoed by Rebecca on the phone to me last week. Thanks for the compliment as well. We want everyone to speak because we want to be sure that there is a varied opinion. We also want to allow people the right to pull remarks. Dona says just Elaine due to the fact that she or Mike might say something that looks like it's about a patient. I'm for that but also know a number of people, reading over the rush transcript before it goes up, will often say, "Oh, I didn't realize I sounded like that" and want to pull it. I disagree that this needs to be eliminated. If it's eliminated a lot of people will be editing their thoughts while speaking. I don't know the answer but we are going to be discussing this at length before we do the next roundtable. I also know the fear that someone is adding to the time required to do it, forget the length, keeps people like Ruth from talking freely. That's another concern that needs to be addressed.
Ruth: I'm more like Kat now. I will speak when I disagree with something or feel like a point is not going to be covered if I do not speak. Elaine's actually the one who worries the most about that.
Jim: See, I didn't know that. In the book discussions, early on, Mike, Wally and Cedric spoke the least. So I made it a point to give Mike and Wally the assignments of overview and I would toss to Cedric. But the reality came out in a roundtable not all that long ago. They were speaking less because they didn't want to be seen as hogging the time and especially hogging the time when a woman might be speaking. So there are a number of things to explore before the next roundtable. And I'm fully okay with someone else moderating.
Elaine: No, no, and no. You're the moderator. That's the way it's been. You do a strong job of it and when it comes up next it will hopefully have been fixed. If it has been fixed and someone else is moderator, the assumption will be, "Oh, Jim was the problem." If there's another moderator, I won't participate because I don't want to send that impression. It's equally true that Ava and C.I.'s roundtable in December of 2006 benefitted from their own personal style which was to go to the person who wasn't talking. That way there wasn't a catch up two-thirds in, everyone had been brought in to it early on. But no one participating doubts Jim's abilities as moderator and, again, I won't participate in any future roundtables or book discussions if Jim's not the moderator unless he's not the moderator because he has the weekend off.
Ty: Dona's holding up two fingers indicating two more e-mails. First up is when will Marcia be interviewed?
Marcia: Next weekend. Jim pointed out that there's a theme this week. I was on the list of topics outlined but I asked for next week. I think I'll know a little more about blogging next week, I couldn't know any less. And Mike interviewed me already.
Ty: Katy asked about when Marcia would be interviewed. Last e-mail was Braeden asking what we think is the most important thing to cover that's coming up? And Mike hasn't spoken at all so he goes first.
Mike: IVAW's Winter Soldier Investigation. We all agree so I guess I'm getting the last word but that's what we all agree on. It's a very important event and we're honestly worried about how much coverage it will receive. Wally also hasn't spoken.
Wally: Yeah, Mike's correct -- and Rebecca's also not spoken -- about the fact that it will be the IVAW event. You're talking about something that is bringing the reality of the illegal war to the United States. Without a filter. And that needs to happen. Cedric and I debated whether we needed to drop our humor posts during that period but decided against it and I'll toss to Cedric for why before Rebecca speaks.
Cedric: We decided not to drop the humor posts. We felt that someone might come by for a chuckle that didn't know about IVAW and would see the excerpt from C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" and learn about the event while getting the chuckle. We fear that it won't get the attention it needs and figure that by offering our humor posts with a C.I. excerpt, we increase the ability for people to learn about it. Rebecca?
Rebecca: Little Media, and I really want to use Ava and C.I.'s new term for it but I know this goes up before their piece so I won't, has done a s**t poor job of covering Iraq for the last two years. That would seem to indicate that we should all be very concerned. By the same token, it is the major event falling near the anniversary of the illegal war so that may help it some. I will write about it myself in addition to include the snapshots but I'll probably pair it with something else for the reasons that Cedric and Wally have.
