Ken vs. the City

In a taped message today, Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawhari said, referring to the Pope’s recent remarks, “This charlatan accused Islam of being incompatible with rationality while forgetting that his own Christianity is unacceptable to a sensible mind.”

I only point it out because I believe one of Christianity’s unique qualities is that it does not require a sensible mind to understand. The good news of Jesus, is so simple that a child can understand it. God reaches out to you. You do nothing. That simplicity is what makes Christianity rational and makes it stalwart enough to hold its own under intense criticism and logical debate by those with much more education and intelligence than myself.

I have nothing to say about Islam, since I know little about it. And I have nothing to say about the Pope, since I don’t know much about him either. But Ayman appears not to know very much about Christianity.

A new word is a funny creature. Especially when it starts out as a bit of jargon that only means something to a small group of people, and then suddenly starts getting used by the general public, who has no idea where the word came from.

The word “podcast” was originally coined by Ben Hammersley, a web developer in the Guardian in 2004, not by Apple. It was originally a combination of “iPod” and “broadcast,” used to describe the delivery of media files using XML-based RSS as a distribution method. The “iPod” part of “podcasting was meant to refer to an iPod as a generic mp3 player. Therein lies the weakness of the term when used in public. Podcasts do not require an iPod. Podcasts can even be incompatable with iPods if they distribute media files that the iPod player does not play, like WMA Windows Media files. And recently, Apple has begun clamping down on companies that use the word “pod,” citing trademark law.

I agree, “podcast” is a terrible name for media content distributed via RSS. Leo Laporte; tech guru, podcaster, and all around jolly fellow; has proposed people use the word “netcast” instead. I also noticed, when listening to Inside the Net, one of Leo’s shows, that he’s changed the intro for shows on the TWiT podcasting network to say “Netcasts you love…” instead of “Podcasts you love…”

I can’t count the number of times someone has told me they can’t get a podcast because they don’t own an iPod without taking off my shoes. Hopefully the word “netcast” will catch on. Unfortunately, “podcast” is the word that most people have heard of. It’s also the one that’s already in the dictionary. And it’s the one that I will continue to use because it’s already in general use. But if “netcast” becomes more widely known, I’ll use it in a heartbeat.

I woke up early this morning in time to see Charlie Rose’s interview with Harvey Weinstein, film maker and co-founder of Miramax, live at the MIXX conference. Hooray for press credentials!

I know of Charlie mainly by reputation. I’ve only watched a couple of his interviews on PBS. I saw his interview with Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Melinda Gates a few months ago, and I watched his interview with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf last night. I’m still learning the art of the interview as I go, and it was interesting to see how an old veteran like Rose operated. I wanted to see what the man was like in-person.

He used no notes, but it was also obvious that he had done a lot of research beforehand. I have no idea how Charlie kept the questions he wanted to ask, as well as all the facts he had to remember straight. But he did it, and the interview seemed professional, but also light and effortless.

He rarely asked a question that could be answered by a “yes” or “no” answer. One of the first lessons I learned through experience was that “yes” or “no” questions rarely yield a useable or interesting answer.

He never backtracked. Each question was presented forcefully, but not harshly. It was all very professional. There was never any point at which I thought Charlie felt apologetic about asking something deeply personal.

He used flattery. Charlie constantly mentioned to Harvey how powerful, influential, and creative he was. Consequently, Harvey was not stingy with his answers.

He used exposition. Charlie constantly paused to expound on some fact or another in order to clarify a question, put it into context, or present information for the audience that they probably didn’t have.

He wasn’t afraid to interrupt. There were frequent times where Charlie would interrupt Harvey’s answer in order to clarify some part of it, or ask another question that built off of the answer.

He used questions that weren’t questions like “Why don’t you talk about…” or “Tell us about…” I’ve been on the fence about these sorts of questions, because I’ve been afraid that they would be too open-ended. Charlie almost always asked these sorts of questions in conjunction with exposition.

He enunciated well and expressed genuine interest in Harvey’s answers. This should be obvious, but I sometimes find myself asking questions of people mechanically, especially when I have three interviews in a row in a span of a few hours. It’s hard to stay curious and genuinely interested when you’re worried about a looming deadline.

It’s always interesting to watch two media organizations wrestle with each other. Each organization has its own distinctive style of attack and rebuttal.

Earlier this month the Boston Globe published an opinion piece by columnist Derrick Jackson blasting GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler for creating large gas-guzzling cars and SUV’s, and ignoring the trend towards smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.

GM responded with an op-ed piece, which the Globe (understandably) didn’t run because of a policy against publishing opinions in response to columns. So they edited it down and ran in their letters to the editor section. GM, determined to tell their side of things, has decided to run the full response on the GM FastLane PR blog. Even though it’s a product of GM’s PR machine, FastLane is a pretty decent automotive blog in its own right.

It’s no publication war, but it’s interesting to see how a corporate blog pushes back against an opinion column in an established print newspaper.

Just a quick piece of wisdom I found:

People that you have issues with are among the ones who will help you grow spiritually. They are the ones that teach you to tolerate the intolerable, reason with the unreasonable, and love the unloveable.

Until September 11, 2001, there were two great pylons that held up the sky in downtown Manhattan. They formed a gateway of commerce. A symbol of economic might and financial power. To some they represented global economic unity and freedom. But to others they represented global economic domination. To me they were something that was just always there.

At 10:00AM Central Standard Time, I was set to read the top news stories on WWSP 90fm radio in Central Wisconsin. The first story: about 15 minutes ago, a plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. At first I thought some pilot had simply drifted off-course and crashed his Cessna into the building. I knew that in 1945 a B-25 bomber accidentally crashed into the Empire State Building. I also knew that the World Trade Center towers were engineered to withstand an impact from a Boeing 707 or a DC-8, the largest aircraft in service in the late 60’s. I was astonished as I read the report that the plane that struck the North Tower was a commercial airliner, and not a small private plane. During those brief moments, the reports coming off the newswire were confused. Most said it was an accident. Terrorism was the farthest thing from my mind.

About three minutes later, another plane struck the South Tower. And everyone knew that this was definitely not an accident. The news coming in off the wire now included claims of responsibility by little terrorist groups no one had ever heard of. I read them all in a state of quiet distress. I have always been an outsider in New York. My family is from there, and we visited just about every summer. I was a timid boy, and never got to know the mass transit system, but wherever I was in Manhattan, I knew I could always look up and see the World Trade Center towers, and they would point me in the right direction. They were strong and made of steel. They had withstood the impacts of two incredibly large airliners. They were still on fire, but steel is fire proof, right?

I didn’t read anymore news. I hadn’t counted on the burning jet fuel that drove temperatures up to 1500 degrees, and sparked other fires that burned even hotter. Temperatures like that were incomprehensible. No wood fire I had ever built could even approach that. And after more than an hour, even mighty steel bows to the power of fire. As I watched on live TV, first one pylon fell, and then the other. I remained glued to the TV for the rest of the week. I wanted to know what was going on, but mostly it was just because one of the solid things I knew, one of the only places in Manhattan that I was familiar with, was gone forever.

CNN’s 9/11 timeline

First Impressions
I’ve just finished watching Part 1 of ABC’s miniseries The Path to 9/11. I thought it was as thrilling as any spy movie I have seen, with a plot that twists its way from the World Trade Center bombings in 1993, to the arrest of mastermind Ramzi Yousef, to the race to capture Osama Bin Laden, and to the arrest of an Al Qaeda operative at the U.S.-Canadian border. ABC aired the movie commercial-free.

It was filmed in the same realistic shaky-cam style that’s used by the SciFi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica series. It felt as if you were part of the scene, and the camera man was catching everything as it was happening. Nearly all the music in the movie came from sources that were actually in the scene: a boombox, a set of drums, a car stereo, a call to prayer. Very immersive. Very gritty. Very intense.

Controversy
ABC has taken a little bit of flak for The Path to 9/11 because the director took some creative license to heighten drama and make things fit in the allotted time frame. The controversy was based around a few scenes that suggest President Bill Clinton was too preoccupied with the Monica Lewinski scandal to follow through on the pre-9/11 capture of Bin Laden. Before the movie was aired this evening, some individuals had been calling for ABC to change the offending scenes. Just read some of the comments left on ABC’s The Path to 9/11 blog. Even Clinton himself expressed his disapproval.

I admit the Lewinski thing was a little cheesy, but I don’t think there was anything political behind it. The U.S. called off a planned operation to capture Bin Laden in his Afghan hideout well before 9/11. I’m not familiar with the inner-workings of the CIA, the FBI, and the government’s anti-terror organizations in the late 90’s, so I can’t even begin to suggest a reason why the operation was called off. I suspect the film maker David L. Cunningham simply used the Lewinski scandal, which was happening at the time, since it was the best concrete motivation available that viewers could identify with.

In response to the controversy, ABC added a disclaimer every hour stating that the movie was not a documentary, and that it was based on the 9/11 commission reports, as well as other published material and personal interviews. They also follwed the airing of Part 1 with a short ABC Nightline news report on the current search for Bin Laden. I understand why they aired the disclaimers, but I thought they were annoying, and I would have preferred to watch The Path to 9/11 without them, especially since the movie was airing without commercial breaks.

Edit: ABC did edit out a few scenes in response to complaints. The scene where the Americans and the Northern Alliance were prepared to capture Bin Laden did feel like it had been cut short. You can view the deleted scenes here.

Conclusion
So far The Path to 9/11 is a great movie. I look forward to Part 2. I don’t know how anyone could confuse the movie with a documentary. It’s filmed in a realistic style, but it doesn’t look anything like a documentary. I suspect the main problem comes from ABC’s use of the word “docudrama” to describe the movie. While a film maker can make a real documentary say just about whatever they want, the prefix “docu” implies that there is certain level of true-to-life footage. The Path to 9/11 has none.

The movie is a movie. And now that it’s been released, instead of complaining about it, people can actually watch it and enjoy it.

Meetings are great for planning, brainstorming, teaching and catching up, but the real value of meetings is to get people excited about a movement, a plan, or an idea. Meetings are better for communicating emotion than for communicating information.

Citizen Kane at his best.