Rich Mintz  

This week on a listserv I read regularly — which happens to be a place where a lot of smart people hang out, each of whom thinks he is smarter than all the others, and, let’s face it, most of them are right — one of those petty little bitchfights broke out that will break out from time to time in such a place. And one smart but impatient person said to another smart but impatient person, by way of ridiculing his harping on some point or other, “Toot that horn, Clarabell.”

I thought that was funny in itself, but Michael Rose pointed out that it’s a reference to “Howdy Doody,” which is something so old that I know about it only from hearing actual old people talk about it. (Employees of Blue State Digital, take note: I am not the oldest person in the world.)

Turns out Wikipedia now knows as much about Howdy Doody as the olds do. (Perhaps an old actually wrote the copy that follows!)

Clarabell the Clown was the mute partner of Howdy Doody…. Clarabell, who wore a baggy, striped costume, communicated by honking a horn for “yes” or “no.” Clarabell would also spray fellow cast member Buffalo Bob Smith with seltzer….

Buffalo Bob Smith and the Kids of the Peanut Gallery sang a song about Clarabell, sung to the tune of “Mademoiselle from Armentières”: “Who’s the funniest clown we know? Clarabell!” (etc.)

For the benefit of those of you who are as old as me but not older: “Mademoiselle from Armentières” is the “Hinky dinky parley-voo” song from World War I — you know, “The first marine found the bean, parley-voo?” — tap tap, is this on? — and World War I, for the benefit of those younger, is the one that has the Germans in it but not the Nazis, not the one with Robert E. Lee and Oliver North. But I digress.

So far so good, except that based on the video below, Clarabell (who, I reiterate, despite the name, is a man) looks like someone grabbed Popeye off the street during a bender and slapped some makeup on him. It’s amazing how ragged and experimental this all looks, fifty years after the fact.

I didn’t really celebrate NYC Pride this year — I was on a train coming back from Baltimore — but I did have the experience of being on the Newark PATH platform on Sunday afternoon as people massed for the trip into the city. And what a festive, jostling mass it was.

In a train like that, you’re reminded of just how wide the definition of the word “gay” has to stretch in order to encompass all of us. At least once a year, people turn out and claim the label who might not fall into the neat Chelsea (or Astoria) or Park Slope (or Red Hook) categories that come first to mind. Even in our homogenized, corporatized, cupcakes-and-Carrie-Bradshaw New York, there’s some diversity left.

Thank God for diversity — not the politically correct one-child-of-every-hue-on-the-cover variety, but the actual festive, jostling reality of America, gay and ungay and everything in between. We would be less than we are if any of the pieces were missing.

And thank God for the generations that came before mine, who marched angrily and proudly in drag and leather chaps (and swept me along with them at the tail end of things, to stand up to LA police on horseback and to CHP officers in Sacramento on the Capitol steps in 1991 to yell “Shame!” at Pete Wilson) so that my boyfriend and I could spend Gay Pride 2010 walking along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan not really thinking about gay rights at all. It’s not over — it never is — but wow. The social changes I’ve seen in the past thirty years go beyond what I ever would have imagined in 1980.

Somehow one of these Keurig K-cup coffee makers showed up in the office, and it was so cute that I decided to try it (despite the fact that, for ten years, I’ve felt that they make inferior coffee). And guess what? The coffee quality is better than it used to be, and they now sell a reusable filter so you can use your own damn coffee. They put it off as long as they could, but finally did the math and decided that being able to sell vastly more coffeemakers made more sense than controlling the coffee supply. (You might say they dumped their Apple strategy and went PC.)

At home I’ve gotten tired of trying to make 6 ounces of coffee in a 12-cup coffeemaker, so I’ve had my eye on coffeemakers (or coffee “solutions,” you might say, if you were marketing-inclined) for a while. I went out looking last night, and it turns out that Bed Bath & Beyond sells a more cheapo-looking version of the same Keurig that’s in the office for more money, so I stopped by J&R to pick up the better-looking one for less, the B30, along with the reusable filter (below).

Experimenting at home, what I’m discovering is that it’s not possible to make RIDICULOUSLY strong coffee with this thing, but it’s plenty possible to make strong-enough coffee with perfect consistency and almost no effort. And if you put good coffee grounds in, you get good coffee out the bottom. So, I’m happy.

The whole thing’s a little too smart for its own good (you have to place coffee, water, cup in order, and I managed to confuse it once and had to essentially reboot it). In fact, there’s a warning in the manual that says if you use a glass mug, it won’t sense it and the thing won’t work. But for a consistently good cup, I can live with all this.

Since a couple of people have asked me: I still like the Macally BOOKSTAND iPad case, but after about a month it’s already showing its wear. It picks up grime (and it’s hard to clean), and the leather on the tongue is starting to split because that’s a point of strain that you’re constantly shoving into the slot when you open it. I’ve attached a few photos to show what I mean.

I give this thing about a six-month lifespan before it falls to pieces. Then again, the iPad inside is absolutely pristine AND much more usable with these new configurations available, so it’s doing its job.

Remember how odd (and oddly exciting) it felt when URLs (or, if you’re old enough to remember, email addresses) started to show up in artifacts of popular culture like outdoor advertising? Well, take a look at this, which I saw in the NYC subway just now:

It’s only a matter of time before you hear the word “hashtag” out loud on TV…

Here comes FarmVille for iPhone.

Could you beat a Muppet in a staring contest? I doubt it.

Daniel Kroop launches Los Angeles and First, a blog about Los Angeles politics — specifically the City Council — that promises to be a good read, if the first week is any indication.

Am I really the only person in America who finds the “gay panic” subtext in this Pretzel M&Ms ad a little bothersome?

Aerolineas, the Argentinian airline, updates its brand identity.

I wanted to write something tonight about Graham Dunstan’s Arts Bloggers panel at the arts conference, because of all the half-dozen sessions I attended, it’s the one I think I got the most practical use out of. And it wasn’t just the panelists — the questions that were asked, and the people who asked them, sparked a wide-ranging conversation about the craft and the value of blogging as part of brand-building and audience-building.

One of the most thoughtful people who spoke up in the session (not a panelist, just an ordinary citizen like me) was Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, who runs the Queens Council on the Arts. She is, of course, a creative and prolific blogger herself, not to mention artist, and I was blown away to discover tonight that in between making memorable comments and taking her own notes, she managed to complete four perfectly fine line drawings on her iPad in her spare time during those 90 minutes we were all in the room together. But I digress.

One of the things I think I remember Hoong Yee herself saying during the session is that good blog writing gives the reader something to react to — it has the effect of drawing the reader into a conversation that is bigger than him or her, but that also welcomes him or her to join in.

This is in contrast to, say, a newspaper op-ed, which might try to convince you of something but isn’t particularly interested in your opinion. I’m reminded of Steve Rosenbaum’s Huffington Post column on the death of the “content strategy” and of Clay Shirky’s essay “Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus” — both of which, as it happens, I read earlier today.

Each in his own way is talking about the new ecology of social content — about the irrepressible human desire not just to consume, but also to respond and to create and to share. For most of us, through most of the history of media — and I’m talking about well into my own lifetime — consumption was the only practical option most of the time. What were we going to do, start our own newspapers? (Some of us did. In elementary school, I published something called the Mintz Prints.. But, again, I digress.) Now that’s all changed, and I agree with Clay — the genie’s never going back in the bottle.

The very best social media — this applies not just to blogs, but to any media that’s meant for a participatory public — makes you feel like there’s a party going on, and you’re invited. It does so by saying so directly (“What are your thoughts on this topic?”), but also indirectly: by playing out an exchange of ideas with other blogs (e.g., as I’m doing here), by quoting and referencing the comments of “ordinary people” whom the imagined reader can relate to, by facilitating the sharing of itself through social media tools.

When an organization establishes a reputation for this kind of social media, its online audience starts to grow more quickly, as readers begin returning of their own accord (without having to be nudged by, say, an email program) to “see what’s new.” (As Graham said in the panel, it’s important when they do come back that there actually be something new for them to see. Once you set up the expectation, you do have to feed it.)

I’ll have more tomorrow about what the panelists themselves said on these important topics.

This light NYT profile of Lesley C. Weston, head of costumes at the Metropolitan Opera, is worth reading just as a reminder that it takes a village to produce the arts, nowhere more so than at the Met (average cost per production: $1 zillion). I didn’t realize that soloists are essentially sewn into their costumes every night, but they are, and the reporter, Robin Finn, gets this gem out of Weston:

It would be a very rare occasion when someone confesses to putting on weight, but we’ve got spies all over the building. We don’t refer to it as putting on weight; we just say someone has “changed.”

Yeesh! “Spies”? And I thought I had to watch my weight!

I spent almost an hour tonight reading Patrick Chovanec’s six-part dispatch from North Korea, linked via Matt Yglesias. I too am fascinated by every fleeting glimpse over the border of what is probably the most isolated and reclusive nation on earth at this moment in history. Chovanec is heading back into North Korea in a few days, apparently, so I’m looking forward to more.

I’m trying to decide whether to bother with the iOS 4 iPhone upgrade, given that I’m certain to be buying a new phone within a few months. I’ll only get a few of the new features, and there are lots of reports of slowdowns associated with the upgrade.

Relatedly: I did set out to do the upgrade last week, only to find myself stalled during the backup phase like this guy. I’d already concluded that a wipe-and-restore — or, more gently, a “delete all apps, upgrade OS, then restore apps one by one,” assuming it works — would be my next step.