Tag Archives: Daring Fireball

David Sedaris on the election

I’m posting hand-me-down blog content here. As is often the case, I have just become aware of something I feel is blog-worthy by reading it on Daring Fireball, simultaneously affirming its blog-worthiness and obviating the need for me to blog about it myself. But I know a few among my meager audience probably do not read Daring Fireball regularly, so I’m helping to spread the word nonetheless.

It is frustrating that often I learn about articles from the “current” issue of the New Yorker from Daring Fireball (or, in the case of the infamous Obama cover, from… everyone) on Monday or Tuesday, when (and it frustrates me to no end) I won’t actually receive my copy in the mail until Friday or Saturday. I’m not sure what crime I’ve committed against Condé Nast besides living in an insufficiently sophisticated region of the country, but they punish me weekly by delaying the arrival of the magazine until after the rest of the world has already moved on.

Anyway… this week’s “Shouts and Murmurs” column is by one of my favorite writers, David Sedaris, and he dishes up a great metaphor for the current election. I’ll rip my block quote directly from Gruber:

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

Indeed. You can read the full article here.

Vintage Google

I learned this morning from Daring Fireball that Google has temporarily restored their earliest available index from 2001, allowing you to see what was available back then for your searches.

Kind of cool. But a little depressing for me personally, to see that back then my site was the first result you’d get when searching for John Coltrane. Now it’s 7th, but I suppose I should be glad it’s still on the front page, given my lack of attention to SEO. (Of course, I think SEO is at least 75% snake oil anyway.)

OK, this is how John Gruber makes $1750 a week on Daring Fireball

I’ve been reading Daring Fireball for a while now (long enough to have noticed and be relieved at the eventual removal of the questionable tagline, “Gay for Macs”), and I’ve enjoyed John Gruber’s pithy insights and diligent distillation of the daily deluge of Mac (and other stuff he’s, apparently, “gay for”) related news into a single useful stream of relevant information.

I’ve also been reading it long enough to know that its primary source of revenue is via a single weekly sponsorship, which culminates in a post touting the greatness of whatever it is you’re promoting via the sponsorship, and a link in his sponsorship archive. And for this he charges $1750 a week. That works out to $91,000 a year. Just for hawking someone else’s wares once a week. Not bad work if you can get it. But how can you get it? Well certainly not by describing your own writing as “blather” and then justifying that description by indiscriminately posting whatever prose crawled out of the dank, cobwebbed recesses of your brain. Trust me, I know.

I get it though. His insights are often brilliant. Case in point, today’s dismantling of my dreams of Flash for the iPhone. OK, I haven’t really dreamed of it. It would be nice, I suppose, but it’s been clear for a while that Apple had reasons beyond their spurious claims of poor performance for keeping Flash off the iPhone.

If you doubt that assessment, please do yourself a favor. Read Daring Fireball and then shut the hell up. I will now heed my own advice.