The comment left on the previous post deserves being here up front:
One thing I’ve noticed even about generally positive TV reports on blogging is that they end right when the subject gets juicy and interesting.
Last night’s Nightline came to a close with the hanging and open question about, in essence, the editorial process — in part inspired by the legislator from Virginia complaining about not having the blogger’s story “run by him” first.
To me, that’s precisely the point at which the meaty discussion happens, and we need to get into the whole issue of blogs “outing” the editorial discussion that normally happens prior to a story’s publication in traditional media, and conducting that discussion out in the open as the story evolves.
When I worked as an “Editorial Associate” at the New York State Legislature (I’m talking 30 years ago), legislative staff made a point of befriending reporters who covered that beat. On the positive side, we wanted the reporters to make sure that they had the facts, had right information when they wrote about proposed legislation. We wanted to make sure that they understood the intent and the planned outcome. On the dark side, of course, hopes were that the reporters would not print something that the legislators did not want printed.
The legislator who appeared on Nightline seemed pretty put-out by the fact that, while reporters always run their stories by him before submitting them for publication, the blogger who stirred up opposition to his one piece of legislation didn’t do that. Well, yeaahhh!
Power players usually understand that one hand washes the other. “You keep this information off your newspaper’s pages, and I’ll give you other inside information that you can use.”
Independent bloggers don’t need to accept those kinds of understandings. Independent bloggers can have the freedom to do what other news media should also do, but all too often don’t — dig out and stir up the actual truth. In complex issues, it’s often a matter of “truths” — examining them, analyzing them, comparing them. And then bloggers have the freedom to add their own conclusions, their own opinions.
Nightline only began to approach that difference between mainstream media journalists and blogger journalists. And it’s an issue that makes all the difference in the world of reporting.

It was great to see some of the people that I met at the first BloggerCon (Jim Moore — for whom my daughter worked when he still had his GeoPartners company –, David Weinberger — who, I notice, has kept me on his blogroll) still there in the middle of things at the Berkman. I think that last night’s Nightline program demonstrated just how difficult it is to capture — in such a short time — the vast potential of blogging for the individual and for the culture. The one point that did get through, however, is what a potent force it is to help an individual make a difference, especially when it comes to government, where individuals seem to have so little power.
I can’t seem to find, online, information about the former teacher/current blogger who was profiled on Nightline regarding her succesful effort to keep a bill from going forward in her state’s legislature. She and b!X are good examples of how one person can affect the workings of government.
Bloggers like those two have done a good job of proving their credibility as reporters/journalists as well as activists by doing the research, making sure both their reporting and linking are accurate.
While there’s still a lot of discussion going on about ethics and blogging, it seems pretty obvious to me that the cream rises to the top. Those blogger/journalists who infuse their personal ethics into their reporting will gain respect and readership. The others will fall by the wayside.
Bloggers as journalists are in the media spotlight these days because their writing can have broad and deep public influence. Bloggers as diarists, like me, are a mixed bag and we don’t have much influence. But we do have fun being on the fringes of this cultural and technological phenomenon.
If I lived closer, still had my young-years’ energy, I would be right there on Thursdays at the Berkman Center. Meanwhile, I watch from a distance and keep blogging.

One Democratic image maker admiringly predicts that our two most relentless blondes will outlast everyone: “When the world ends, there will be left only a few cockroaches, Cher, Hillary and Martha.”
So ends Maureen Dowd’s column “Alpha Gals Can Prosper as Victims” in my local newspaper today, a column that begins with:
Every culture has its own way of tamping down female power, be it sexual, political or financial. Americans like to see women who wear the pants be beaten up and humiliated. Afterward, in a gratifying redemption ritual, people like to see the battered women rewarded.
Unless, of course, you’re a version of Condi Rice, who, Dowd suggests
does not need to play the victim to make people feel better about her power because she was never seen as a termagant, pushing people around and bending them to her will. She always seemed subservient to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, a willing handmaiden and spokesman for their bellicose bidding.
When men fall from grace, it’s almost impossible for them to regain any kind of stature (except if you’re someone like Rush Limbaugh with a neo-conservative base that’s expert in denial, or if you’re one of the good ‘ol boys and your buddies keep you afloat in the background). When women fall from grace, it’s a different story — as Dowd goes on to explain:
Obviously, many men are uncomfortable with successful women, so when these women are brushed back, alpha men can take comfort in knowing alphettes are not threateningly all-powerful and they had better soften those sharp edges.
The double standard is alive and unwell.

Sitting Saturday with an 18 pound cat holding onto my lap for dear life while I watch “Sylvia” on my computer screen because the DVD player that’s part of my TV doesn’t work.
“Poets are Shamans,” he says to woo her. “What are rituals and incantations but poetry.” How could she resist?
Without the seratonin uptake inhibitors, would I have been another Sylvia? With them, would she have been another me?
I remember the darkness and lying, exhausted, across my unmade bed while my daughter and son worried and did what they had to.
There is a power in that darkness. Words crawl around like snakes slowly curving themselves into dark meanings. The trick is not to fall into the pit.
I am no Lady Lazarus. I am no Sylvia.
I am, however, fond of snakes.

A Kentucky high school student who wrote a story about Zombies invading a high school has been arrested and jailed.
Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole’s home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.
Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.
“My story is based on fiction,” said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. “It’s a fake story. I made it up. I’ve been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies.”
Some reports say that he didn’t mention “zombies” in the story that his grandparents unearthed from his journal.
Thanks to the tenor of the times established by the Bushites (who perpetrated the WMD PR fiasco)and the pressures of their fear-inspiring Patriot Act, some Americans no longer can distinguish between fact and fiction, between creative writing and terrorism.
Grandparents turning in grandchildren! Don’t they talk to each other??!! Oh wait, it’s Kentucky — a really RED state, where they blindly follow the country’s blind leader and don’t hesitate to Rush to judgment
I guess none of the adults in Kentucky have every watched Buffy.

Here’s a little brain teaser for all you smart and literate people out there. (I know the answer because I cheated.)
Last year, a man went on vacation to Key West. He spent most of his time either sport fishing on the high seas or carousing on Duval Street. A friend of his prefered a very different kind of vacation. He liked hiking and camping and using stone-age toilet facilities. So he spent most of his vacation in the woods in California and the Pacific Northwest.
When both men returned from their trips, they compared notes. The first man explained that on his vacation he saw something that, when written down, has all five vowels, and the vowels make up five of the seven letters in the word. ( A-E-I-O-and-U were all in the same word) In fact, he saw not just one, but a few of these things.
His friend replied: “When I got to Key West, I also saw something that when written down has all five vowels in its seven letters. In fact, I saw quite a few of these as well.”
Each man wrote down his seven-letter word, and then they exchanged papers. Both men had written down the same word. But what they saw were very different things.
What did each man see?

I hadn’t thought about Annie Dillard in ages, but she popped into my head as I was writing my previous post last night.
And then, this morning I open my email and see this horoscope from Rob Brezny’s Free Will Astrology:
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In her book, *For the Time Being,* Annie Dillard says that throughout history many people have thought civilization was on the verge of collapse. Around 300 B.C., Hindus believed they were living in a “degenerate and unfortunate time” known as the Kali Yuga–the lowest point in the great cosmic cycle. In 426 A.D., the Christian writer Augustine mourned that the world was in its last days. In the 1800s, renowned Hasidic Rabbi Nachman grieved for the world’s “widespread atheism and immorality.” Dillard offers more examples, concluding, “There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less . . . There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree.” Go sit under that tree, Pisces. The time for your awakening is now at hand.
So I’ll take that as a hint to go and read more Dillard.
I am SO ready for an awakening. I just hope it’s not a rude one.

Part 1.
Today, March 1, Senator Robert Byrd delivered the following remarks at the end of his speech warning the Senate and the American people about a procedural effort being considered by some Senators to shut off debate and shut down minority voices and opinions. It’s worth a read to hear him roar.
Yes, we believe in Majority rule, but we thrive because the minority can challenge, agitate, and question. We must never become a nation cowed by fear, sheeplike in our submission to the power of any majority demanding absolute control.
Generations of men and women have lived, fought and died for the right to map their own destiny, think their own thoughts, and speak their minds. If we start, here, in this Senate, to chip away at that essential mark of freedom – – here of all places, in a body designed to guarantee the power of even a single individual through the device of extended debate – – we are on the road to refuting the Preamble to our own Constitution and the very principles upon which it rests.
In the eloquent, homespun words of that illustrious, obstructionist, Senator Smith, “Liberty is too precious to get buried in books. Men ought to hold it up in front of them every day of their lives, and say, ‘I am free – – to think – – to speak. My ancestors couldn’t. I can. My children will.'”
Part 2.
And as we begin this month of celebrating the history of women on this planet, let us also roar loudly and angrily over the fact that it is still males of our human species that continue to abuse their power against us.
From an Awakened Woman e-newsletter:
Are they not all men, raping murdering and torturing? It is men who are killing the planet, until we get that, hear that, except that, it will continue. It is white American men who pimp 11 and 12 year old girls. It is the Southern British men who are the number one recipients of the world wide sex slave trades. It is the African men who rape in Africa. And the list of the races of men who rape are endless!
Here’s just one horrifying example.
Part 3.
At some point in my daughter’s early high school years, she and a friend performed in a school Variety Show by miming Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman Hear Me Roar. I remember helping them with their costumes, which began as suffragette long skirts, long sleeved blouses, and hats that velcroed-off half-way through to reveal jeans and sneakers and t-shirts.
I’ve been roaring since the 60s, but we really haven’t come a long way baby (remember that Virginia Slim cigarette slogan of decades ago?), at all.
And while it’s not rape, murder, or abduction for sex-slavery, this little essay captures the long road we still have ahead on a very basic level.
Part 4.
So, while some of us keep trying, in our own personal way, to find sources from which to draw psychological sustenance while we gear up for more roaring, my nemesis, Chris Locke continues to try to put some of us into boxes that he can stack up and stand on. I know that he’s using his blog to work out his book-in-progress while he’s earning his keep promoting and demonstrating the value of buying into the services of High Beam Research. I have no problem with that.
What I have a problem with is his obsession with forcing relationships between women who create their own spiritual destinies and either New Age airheads or Nazi narcissists or some other combination thereof.
Part 5.
The theme for the 2005 Women’s History Month is “Women Change America,” and there’s a growing list of such women that I think should include contemporary leaders like Senator Barbara Boxer.
These women put themselves out into the Big Picture and try to change the world they live in.
But there also are women who struggle each day to save their pieces of the Little Picture — artists who bring women together to explore who they really are aside from the expectations of men; writers who try to move and motivate women who have lost touch with their own energies, their own ambitions, their own souls’ hungers. These women also change worlds.
Many of us women like the feeling of having our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds. Back in the 70s, after reading one of Annie Dillard’s essays about a tree alive with light, I wrote this (not very good) poem:
I choose the cosmic and the common,
refusing to sever half my soul.
I choose to grow in all directions —
to bear both fruit and inedible root,
to glory in the ground and desire the sky,
to stretch roots across acres
and reach for bedrock.
I eschew the single minded vision.
I am all I.
Now, I suppose, some people would call that narcissism.
Part 6.
Here in the Northeast, March has roared in like a lion.
March is a month for roaring. I am woman. Hear me roar.

I’ve had enough of the doldrums. Enough of the frumpies. In the past three years (which is how long the caregiving for my mom has successfully eroded those parts of my life that were carefree and convivial) I’ve gone from Funky Grammy to Frumpy Grammy. (My much loved toddler grandson calls me “Grammy.”)
In a couple of weeks I’ll hit my 65th birthday, and so I’ve been taking some photos of myself for my annual birthday post. FRUMPY!!
So I’ve made an appointment to get my hair styled at a new salon by one of its “artists.” As my hair goes, so seem to go I. It’s worth a try.
A brisk walk around the park on this cold but sunny Sunday was also worth a try. I breathed. Cold, clean, fresh air — just the opposite of what fills this building full of old people who always seem to be cold and so crank up the heat. I don’t have to turn my own heat on all winter; I’m surrounded by apartment-sized hot-boxes.
I’ve decided that there’s some cause and effect relationship between “cluttered” and “frumpy.” My apartment is too cluttered, too full of stuff. Stuffy. Today, I started TRYING to unclutter so that I can unfrump. I’m trying. I’m trying. But it’s sooo hard to get rid of books; English majors can’t seem to part with their beloved books.
And for me, add to my book obsession, hair and shoes. And then, of course, there’s blogging. I’m overwhelmed by my obsessional possessions.
It helps with frumpies and doldrums and obsessions to have something to laugh about. Or at least to smile about. So I checked over at Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages, where I remember seeing his post of 2/23 that listed questions that no one seems to be able to answer, like:
— Light travels faster than sound: Is that why some people appear bright until you hear them speak?
— Whose cruel idea was it for the word “lisp” to have an “s” in it?
— Why do you press harder on a remote control when you know the battery is dead?
— Why are they called buildings, when they’re already finished? Shouldn’t they be called builts?
— Why do people without a watch look at their wrist when you ask them what time it is?
— Why is the alphabet in that order?
— What would a chair look like if your knees bent the other way?
— Why do scientists call it research when looking for something new?
— Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it.
— How come Superman could stop bullets with his chest, but always ducked when someone threw a gun at him?
— Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle?
— Why doesn’t Tarzan have a beard?
— Isn’t Disney World a people trap operated by a mouse?
Those are the ones I like the best, but he’s got more listed on his blog.
He also has a wonderful poem called “Seeds” that helped a little more to move me out of my Winter Doldrums.
Check out Dick’s blog. It’s a gem.

“Don’t I remember crisp, clear-skied and sunny winter days when I spent most of the time outdoors sledding and building snow forts?” my mother-of-toddler daughter asked me not too long ago.
Yup. It seems to me that there were lots of days like that, when kids from toddlers to teens rolled around in pristine snow banks until the sun went down — much too early.
The sun still sets too early, but it doesn’t seem to matter these days. It’s dismal, dreary. Not enough snow to be fun; just enough to be sloppy.
There’s no sun. I’m eating too much chocolate. Eating too much.
So today I hauled myself out and drove down to the New York State Museum for its annual Gem, Mineral, and Fossil show. I’m not into minerals, but I know from past years that sometimes there are vendors selling interesting jewelry.
I by-passed the jewelry this time and wound up buying several “fossil gastropods” — 80 million year old mollusks similar to our modern day snail, or so the tags tell me.
I have in my hand something that lived 80 million years ago. Mollusks actually date back to more than 500 million years ago, so the ones I bought are relatively not very old at all.
But they’re old enough. And so am I. At least that’s how I’m feeling on this dark day that I mostly slept away, except for my journey that ended with finding those delicately etched stone cold fossils that I’ve decided to use in some sort of ceremony when my group of women friends meet on the day of the Spring Equinox.
Wouldn’t it be nice to think that, 80 million years from now, what’s fossilized of me will inspire someone to create something — something to conjure back her 5 billion year old sun.