As you have all figured out by now, my zombies post was part of the Blog Like It’s the End of the World. Now that we have all collectively beaten back the zombie hordes, I thought I’d mention that parts of the previous post were real.

We do have the shotgun I talked about. When Misty’s dad cheerfully told me how it had broken his nose and his dad’s nose and his dad’s dad’s nose, I determined that I’d never fire that thing ever. Not that I have ammunition for it — if you tried to put modern shotgun shells in the thing, you’d blow the barrel open. The shotgun used to hang in our guest room. When we converted it to Liza’s bedroom, Misty wouldn’t let me leave it in there. I even mentioned that it would be useful to have out when Liza started bringing home gentlemen callers, but no dice. Storme did point out that I’d be better off putting it in plain sight in the living room anyway.

Redstone Arsenal is close by, and did make and store chemical munitions once upon a time. They don’t any more, though.

AS FAR AS I KNOW.

And sorry, Amy and Jeff. I didn’t know your voicemail music was to throw any phone-using zombies off your trail.

Also: zoloooooolmbies!

Misty’s dad gave us a shotgun a while back. It was originally Misty’s great-granddad’s, and dates to the 1880s. It’s broken the noses of three generations of Clarks, so of course it’s a family heirloom.

I never thought I’d fire it. As old as it is, getting ammunition for it is difficult. You have to order it special. I did order some, just because I had to fire the gun at some point.

That point was this afternoon. I was at home helping take care of Eli and Liza while Misty went to the doctor, and after she came back, well, it seemed like the opportune time.

Of course it broke my nose.

I don’t actually know that it’s broken, but it hurts terribly, and there’s blood all down the front of my shirt. I wouldn’t have even gone through with firing the gun except for the two zombies that were trying to break into my house.

I’ve canvassed the neighborhood. Not that many people made it home from work. Lucky I was here, I suppose. My next door neighbor Richie was home. It looked like he’d been bitten by one of the other zombies, which he’d killed with a handy axe. The bite looked bad, so I shot him in the face. I remembered to compensate for the kickback this time. With Liza, Eli and Misty next door, I wasn’t taking any chances.

Redstone Arsenal isn’t too far south of me. When the Army created the arsenal in World War II, it was used to create and store chemical munitions. They shut that part of the base down years and years ago, or so they claimed. Needless to say, it’s clear where the zombies came from. I’d have wondered if it was due to the NASA center here in town, but they haven’t really been in the business of going to space and bringing back things they found for a long time.

I tried to contact some of my friends. Geof‘s last Twitter post just says, “Rrrrrrrgh.” Amy and Jeff‘s phone now plays Zombie Me over and over again.

It’s just as well. Even though Amy and Jeff live so close to us, their cars both require high-octane gas and aren’t that fuel efficient. We’re loading up and getting out of Dodge before the zombies overrun us. I’ve been trying to figure out our best plan. The big family car gets so-so gas mileage but has a 14-gallon tank. As I calculated just this afternoon, my new Fit is getting some 36 miles to the gallon, but it only has a 10-gallon tank. Decisions, decisions.

If any of you read this and — I can’t stress this enough — aren’t yet zombies, call me on my cell phone, assuming power doesn’t go out. If you can’t reach me, I’m headed towards Tennessee. There’s a place we intend to hole up. If we can hold off the zombies, fine. If not, we’ll at least have fun dying.

Can zombies track you by the smell of blood? I’d stop to shower and change before we go, but the kids are scared and I’ve wasted too much time on this post as it is.

Man. Zombies.

[tags]zombies, shotgun, broken nose, buckshot-it’s-what’s-for-breakfast[/tags]

Veronica Mars “officially dead”.

Just last year, TIME Magazine named You as their person of the year. Yes, you.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

I was skeptical. Sure, you can occasionally sift through the online dross and discover gold. But Sturgeon’s Law hasn’t been repealed. 90% of everything is crud, and that percentage might be higher on the Internet.

Then I began seeing evidence that user-generated content and aggregated effort could work wonders. Joshua Micah Marshall set the readers of Talking Points Memo to searching the Justice Department’s 3,000 pages of information on the potentially political dismissal of U.S. attorneys. People figured out the lonelygirl15 hoax. The lolcat phenomenon took off.

And now I have proof positive that You, by which I mean all of us schlubs on the Internet, are the future of media and democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you High School: A Big Waste of Time, by Bambi, as seen on Associated Content.

The article starts out promisingly by undermining any point it might make:

The following article is based on my own high school experience and may or may not be what you experienced or how your high school may have been set up.

It takes off from there. The article discusses how “[m]any teachers seem to be just that, teachers, not teachers.” It explains how school is all about things you don’t need for real life, like Algebra 2. And finally:

In addition, I’ve been out of school for not even 6 months now. I can’t think of a single thing that I remember.

Associated Content, with your user-generated content about school and The Infamous Pike Place Market and The Truth About Bottled Water, you have shown me the future.

As you know I have a baby. Which means no time for my favorite hobby, cross-stitch.

Not so! Thanks to the power of the internet I can cross-stitch interactively AND do something for the Brazilian rain forest. I’m so addicted. Thanks Internet!

Still Alive

Wait patiently while the link above loads and get busy cross-stitchin’!

Three years ago as I was sitting in a church council meeting, our pastor told us about a CBF program that we had been asked to participate in. This new program paired graduating ministers with healthy churches in a two-year internist learning program. As Ronnie was talking about it, I got chills.

Let me pause here and say that that doesn’t happen to me very often. In fact I can honestly say it’s only ever happened twice. Is this God’s way of talking to me? I don’t know. I do know that both times it’s happened, something really important has followed.

After the meeting, I told him I felt like this was a program we must participate in and that I felt very strongly about it.

I had no idea who the young minister would be.

Fast forward about a year. It was summer and we had a young child. We weren’t getting to church super regularly because, well, we had a little kid. On a Sunday in June when we were there, Ronnie introduced Rachel Luck to the congregation. She was tall and dark-haired and she seemed shy. I wondered if she was so shy, why she had decided to become a minster. Sometime after that, I got an email from Ronnie asking me and about 10 other families to take Rachel under our wing. To intentionally invite her into our lives since we had played some role in getting her to our church.

I asked her to come over for dinner one night. I don’t actually remember the first dinner. Or the second, or the fifth or the twenty-fifth. Yet over the past two years, Rachel has become an honorary member of our household. When she is here, she acts like she is home. She loads the dishwasher after dinner. She has a toothbrush in the bathroom. When Stephen is away on business trips, she spends the night so I won’t go bonkers here by myself. She has become a very good friend. We have bonded in a way that is unusual for me in so short a length of time.

Now the two years have gone by. Rachel has found her first job. She is moving to North Carolina tomorrow. She is coming over for lunch today and it’ll be the last time we see her for probably a long while.

I’ve known a day like this was coming since she got here. This particular day has been looming for several weeks. I have intentionally not thought about it, pushed it out of my mind so that I wouldn’t start feeling the pain of loss too soon. Regretting the hole she will be leaving at our table. Eli doesn’t know life without Rachel. Will she be the first person he remembers moving from his life? And Liza will not know the comfort of having Rachel around.

I am so excited for Rachel. She has found a church that seems like it will fill something in her as she fills something in it. A good match. It’s in a town where I have some college friends and I hope to get in touch with them so she can touch base with them. Geof has a long-time friend at the church where she will be working. Rachel has already met and had coffee with her. A small world moment that made me realize that this was a good move for her, that it was the right path. I can’t wait to hear how her new life takes off, even as a mourn the loss in my life.

I hope it won’t be long before I get to see her again. I hope that these past two years are not all we will ever spend together. I hope her new life is exactly what she needs and her new church is exactly what will help her grow. I hope her new church realizes what they are getting in Rachel.

This is what church is about. Spending time with people. Helping them grow as they help you do the same. Being open to loving someone you know from the beginning will leave. Being open to love a church you know from the beginning you will leave behind.

Best wishes on your journey, Rachel. I can’t wait to hear your new stories even as I’m jealous of your new church home.

A while back I posted recordings of El saying things. This time I’m posting recordings of Eli and his cousin Sam saying things! You should definitely listen to what Sam has to say when you’re done oohing and aahing over Eli.

First up, here’s Eli and Sam making animal sounds.
[audio:animal-sounds-eli-and-sam.mp3]

And Eli’s version of “Old MacDonald” (not to be confused with Sam’s version).
[audio:old-macdonald-eli.mp3]

I got Eli to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” again, but this is the remix version, complete with funny voices.
[audio:twinkle-twinkle-remix.mp3]

In fact, let’s hear Eli sing “The Wheels on the Bus” and “All Around the Mulberry Bush” and Sam tell Eli to sing more.
[audio:long-singing.mp3]

Eli has begun telling stories about his toys. At this point you can give him two or three objects and say, “Eli, tell me a story about these!” and he obediently strings together a stream-of-consciousness narrative glued together with the phrases “and then one day”.
[audio:eli-story.mp3]

Finally, here are Eli and Sam proclaiming their love of Trogdor.
[audio:trogdor.mp3]

Because of the baby, we aren’t current on The Sopranos. Please don’t spoil it for me by talking about it. (I’m looking at all of you Early Morning News Programs.)

Ah, Jericho. I used to watch that TV show, grumbling about how it got hydrogen bombs and fallout and static electricity wrong (though it was okay on EMPs). I eventually stopped watching. That’s why I wasn’t too hurt — or surprised — by its cancellation.

Except that a funny thing happened on the way to the chopping block. Jericho fans bombarded CBS with emails and letters and packages of nuts, and in response, CBS renewed Jericho for seven episodes as a mid-season replacement. CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler cautioned fans, though: “[F]or there to be more ‘Jericho,’ we will need more viewers.”

Fans of other canceled shows have taken note. There’s a campaign underway to send Mars bars to the CW to save Veronica Mars. No word yet as to whether fans of Drive are sending cars to FOX.

Regardless, I don’t expect campaigns of this sort to work often, and they’ve had decidedly mixed success in the past. The big problem is that fans think they’re what determines a show’s success, when there is plenty of evidence indicating that they’re not.

Let’s talk about Firefly. The Joss Whedon western-in-space series died a rapid death on FOX. Its fans wrote letters and put an ad in Variety, but to no avail. It was the series’s DVD sales that Joss Whedon managed to convince Universal Studios to greenlight a movie version, called Serenity. Many of the blogs I read then were ecstatic. Friends went to the movie’s early screenings and loved the movie. Entertainment Weekly predicted an opening weekend take of $17 million.

Serenity took in $10 million its first week.

Fans mobilized. They evangelized. They bought extra tickets and handed them out to strangers. When knowledgeable people pointed out that SF movies’ box office take typically drops by 50% in the second week, Joss Whedon himself posted a message saying that he was working to prevent that.

Serenity took in $5 million its second week.

Why were fans and online commentators so wrong? How did they mis-estimate so badly? Because of blogsight and an overestimate of fans’ numbers and influence.

Blogsight is the Internet version of selection bias. Online behavior mimics offline: we tend to hang out with people like us. We read blogs and visit sites that match our interests. If you like a TV series and read blogs written by fans of the series and everyone on these blogs discusses the latest episode and speculates about what will happen next week and writes fanfic involving the hot scientist, then you and the other fans will likely overestimate how popular the series really is. It doesn’t help that only those who love or hate the show will speak up. All the people who saw an ad for Serenity and said, “Meh,” didn’t post about it on their blogs. The one who said “OMG SQUEEEEE!” did.

Beyond blogsight, there’s how the Internet magifies the apparent number of fans. Online communities can have a global membership. I may only know five or six Firefly fans locally, but online I can go to FireflyFans.net and find tens of thousands of them. That seems like a lot, but it isn’t, not compared to the kind of audiences mass market entertainment can draw. Around 100,000 people signed an online “Save Jericho!” petition. 9.5 million people watched the show. Jericho’s only coming back as a mid-season replacement, and even if you took the number of people signing the petition and doubled them, you’d make a 1% change in the number of Jericho viewers.

For a non-entertainment example of both blogsight and people overestimating their impact, look at John Scalzi’s campaign for the presidency of SFWA, the organization for writers of speculative fiction. He had philosophical concerns about the unopposed candidate for president and announced that he was running for president as a write-in candidate. A lot of people discussed his candidacy, with many saying, “Great! I’m voting for Scalzi!” People made campaign posters. SFWA made a publically-accessible forum for people to ask the candidates questions. Technorati showed a spike of discussion about SFWA. Judging from blog discussions, and despite his warnings about his chances, Scalzi seemed like a shoo-in. And yet, he lost by a factor of nearly 3 to 1.

Mass-market entertainment lives or dies by casual fans, not hardcore ones. That is even more true for ad-supported media. It’s no accident that the word “core” is part of “hardcore”. Hardcore fans are a dense nucleus around which you can build a fanbase, but there aren’t enough of them to be your sole support. You want to appeal to as many people as possible, and you want to make it as easy as possible for casual viewers, readers or listeners to to enjoy. The wide-net effect is in part why the 2007 NCAA Division I men’s basketball championship drew nearly a third again as many viewers on TV as game six on the 2006 NBA finals — 19.6 million versus 15.7 million. More people have gone to a school with a division I men’s basketball team than live in a city with an NBA franchise, and NBA teams can move away from your town. The casual-viewer effect is why TV shows with an ongoing, involved story are a hard sell. For every hit show like Heroes and Lost there are far more like Jericho and Veronica Mars and Drive that limp along with an ever-decreasing audience. Casual viewers who turn into a mid-season episode of a TV show with a big narrative arc are lost.

None of this is to say that fans shouldn’t attempt to save shows, or promote the media they love. Fans do have an effect. The “Save Jericho” campaign showed that, as did the Family Guy and Firefly fans who bought enough DVDs to help resurrect those shows, and the Farscape fans who helped make the show-ending miniseries possible. It is to say that fans, and I include myself in that category, should take part in show-saving efforts with a good idea of the chances and with restrained optimism. Blogsight and overestimating our importance won’t help.

[tags]fans, fandom, blogsight, jericho, firefly, serenity[/tags]

The week before Liza was born my mom took pity on us and came out to save our sanity. While she was here the first Sunday night, she asked if she could watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I laughed because I thought it was a bad reality show but said we could Tivo it so she could watch it.

I am now totally addicted to this show. I think about it all week and wonder what the situation is going to be on the show. How many kids will be in the family. How much extra stuff they will manage to cram into their homes/garages that these families need. If there will be scholarships for the kids.

I don’t know if it’s because there’s nothing else right now on tv to watch or if it’s the best kind of train wreck, a situation that robs me of my ability to look away, but I can’t stop watching. And I suppose it’s better than being addicted to The Sopranos.