Internet voyeurism was born 329 years ago today

Lady Godiva by John Collier, ca 1897

On this day in history, May 31, 1678, a Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets of Coventry, England, to protest her husband's taxation on the people. She had begged him again and again to lift the toll. He finally told her that he would grant her request if she would ride naked through the streets of the town.

Godiva issued a proclamation that all the townsfolk should keep in doors and shut their windows. According to legend, only the town tailor, Tom, disobeyed her order. He was known thereafter as "Peeping Tom".

And not much has changed in 329 years.

Poignant guides to computer languages

So RTFM stands for "Read the Fucking Manual," implying that not many do. Can you blame them? Most manuals and computer books are ultra-stuffy and boring. Well, here's one you'll actually enjoy reading. It's poignant. The freely available book, Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, is part programming manual, part comic book, part journal, and all art. I've never seen a computer book like this, but I hope I'll see a lot more of them in the future. In-depth coverage of the Ruby programming language coupled with an almost punk zine story telling.

Check it out, it's free!

Excerpt:

My conscience won’t let me call Ruby a computer language. That would imply that the language works primarily on the computer’s terms. That the language is designed to accomodate the computer, first and foremost. That therefore, we, the coders, are foreigners, seeking citizenship in the computer’s locale. It’s the computer’s language and we are translators for the world.

But what do you call the language when your brain begins to think in that language? When you start to use the language’s own words and colloquialisms to express yourself. Say, the computer can’t do that. How can it be the computer’s language? It is ours, we speak it natively!

We can no longer truthfully call it a computer language. It is coderspeak. It is the language of our thoughts.

What's a liberal?

Kobe is my nephew. He's a political commentator at age eleven.

I got together with some of my family on Memorial Day to grill out at the park. They tease me about being "liberal," though I'm actually pretty moderate in my political views. I'm liberal in that I believe in spending to support the arts, but I'm conservative in that I believe in controlled spending. I like to think my opinions cancel each other out and leave me neutral, but I must admit I'm more liberal than anyone else in the family. They like to mess with me about it.

So, we're at the park and Justin (my brother) tells Kobe, "Ask Uncle Jeremy what a liberal is." Apparently he had already asked his dad before.

"Uncle Jeremy, what's a liberal?" Kobe asked.

"Well, a liberal is someone who believes in individual personal freedoms," I replied.

He looked at me a moment, and I thought he was going to ask something related. He did. It was in fact very related and straight to the point.

He said: "Uncle Jeremy, can you take out that earring? It's kind of scary. Why would a guy wear an earring?"

I couldn't think of what to say because I couldn't stop laughing. I told him that he had just earned a post on my blog. So here he is: Kobe, 11, political commentator.

Cheat sheet for the un-geek

You may have seen these code snippets on t-shirts and thought wtf? For those un-1337, like my Mom, I reprint them here w/ translations.

There's no place like 127.0.0.1
All network connections are assigned a numerical address. 127.0.0.1 is the local address of your computer for internal communication. In other words, this reads "There's no place like home."

10 print Home
20 print Sweet
30 goto 10
In BASIC (a programming language), code is written in numbered lines and performed in sequence. This says to print "Home", then "Sweet", then go back and print "Home". "Home Sweet Home".

There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Binary code answers questions in yes (1) or no (0). You probably read that as "10" if you're not geek.

01111001 01101111 01110101 01100001 01110010 01100101 01100100 01110101 01101101 01100010
Obviously binary code, but what's it say? Well, it says "You are dumb".

$> cd /pub
$> more beer
UNIX for "Go to the pub, get more beer".

SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
Information is retrieved from databases via Structured Query Language (SQL) statements like this one that literally reads "Select all users where clue is greater than zero". In other words, "Select all the users that have a clue".

$> man woman
$> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Pretty much self explanatory. UNIX combines man and woman. Sad things happen.

Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
In HTML, colors are expressed in hex codes like these.

RTFM
This is an acronym that most un-geeks don't understand. If they did, they wouldn't have to hire geeks so often. It stands for "Read the fucking manual".

PEBKAC
Variation on RTFM. You may have heard tech support tell you that it is a PEBKAC problem. Sadly, it stands for "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair". Yes, that means you.

Got Root?
In Linux, root privileges gives you complete power over the system. "Got root?" means "Have you hacked it?"

/(bb[^b]{2})/
Regular expressions are used in programming to find strings of characters that match a certain pattern. For example, the expression "g*gol" matches ggol, gogol, googol, gooogol, etc. This expression reads "To be or not to be", one of Shakespeare's famous lines.

01111001 01101111 01110101 01100001 01110010 01100101 01100100 01110101 01101101 01100010
Still means "you are dumb". Just checking if you're paying attention : )

i > u
The ultimate inequation. "I am greater than you."

42
The answer to life, the universe, and everything. Duh.

And for my 01001101 01001111 01001101 who can't read any of this, that means "MOM".

Yipee kay aye model maker!

A friend of mine works in Hollywood as a special effects, model/prop maker. I knew he did some work on the upcoming Live Free or Die Hard movie, so I sent him an email asking what parts his crew were involved in. He replied...

A lot of our stuff is in the trailer: the car jumping into a helicopter, the plane sequence, the freeway chase, the semi truck explosions, the elevator sequence, and more. It's looking pretty nice.

Um, yeah. Check out the trailer. It's friggin sweet.



I'm in the wrong business. I don't get to blow anything up : (

Ah well. Yipee kay aye model maker!

The state that bleeds blue and votes red

What's a blog without a little politics? Election primaries (today) suck for registered Independents, like myself. I can't vote (no one to vote for). Local politics are all skewed anyway. Everyone around here are registered Democrats — Southern Democrat I'd imagine — but they consistently vote red, like Southern Democrats do. UK sports led to the phrase that "Kentucky bleeds blue". I joke about the conflicting politics in Kentucky when I say it's the only state that bleeds blue but votes red. I vote the colors of a sunset, and my opinions are just as varied.

PSA: Don't let anyone play with your instrument

Speaking of musicals, just today Tracie was watching The Music Man (1962).

"Hold on, you've got to hear this," she said (DVR makes for a lot of great pause and rewind moments).

Harold Hill talking to a boy confused about his French horn:

[Boy asks how to hold his instrument. Teacher laughs and says...]
Hill: Experimentation! Trial and error!
Boy: Could you show me professor?
Hill: Son, I'm gonna tell you something the great Gasepi Creatori (sp?) said
to me once under like circumstances...
'Professor Hill,' he said. 'That is your instrument. Hold onto it. Cherish it. Don't let anybody else play around with it, not even me, not even you. Until you feel you are ready.'

Ah yes, great advice for little boys everywhere : ) Don't let anyone play with your instrument, not even you, until you are ready.

I like the stuff that doesn't suck, part 2

Continuing with filling out pages in my profile, next up: Movies.

This is another difficult one to put a finger on. I can't point to a specific genre and say I like that because, really, I like everything from popcorn blockbuster action summer hits to drama, comedy, horror, ganster films, spy versus spy and so on. Even the genres that I don't like, like musicals, I like some of, like Chicago. Not a big fan of Grease, though, because I'm not gay.

I can't really list off all the movies I like either. They make so damn many.

I am a fan of special effects. What computer graphics-guy isn't? I can't say that I like all special effects driven movies, however, especially those that sacrifice other elements in favor of a really cool look, like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Final Fantasy. I did love the look of the parts I stayed awake through. By comparison, Sin City and 300 didn't suffer anything for their look. No surprise there, Frank Miller was involved.

Kind of related note: I like animated films, like Shrek and the Pixar du jour, but when the industry releases six or so of these a year I kind of lose interest in any of them.

So if I like everything some of the time, and nothing all of the time, are there any good guidelines to go off? Absolutely. There's some actors, actresses, and directors that I'll give a fair shake to everytime. That's not to say I like all their movies, but I'll watch all of them at least once in a benefit of the doubt. Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino as directors have earned that from me. Steven Soderbergh as producer. George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Anthony Hopkins, Nicholas Cage, and Kevin Spacey as actors. Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Naomi Watts are actresses off the top of my head. There's probably more that I can't remember right now; these are just examples. I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody.



Speaking of consistency, I always check the lineup at Focus Features. They're the ones who released (my favorites of those I've seen so far): Being John Malkovich, Traffic, The Shape of Things, Swimming Pool, Sylvia, 21 Grams, Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Door in the Floor, The Constant Gardener, The Ice Harvest, and Hollywoodland. That's a lot of great flicks from one place.

There's a lot of films that I like that you may have never heard of because I like a lot of indie films. Watch IFC. Good stuff there. I don't snub the mainstream movies, though. I was first in line at the midnight openings of the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter films. It was a lot easier when I was a kid. Raiders of the Lost Ark all the way.

Films that most of the people I know don't like, but I really do: American Beauty, I Heart Huckabees, Napoleon Dynamite and [a lot of others] ahem, Titanic. Anyone who doesn't like those films should be eaten by a liger. It's pretty much my favorite animal.

A boy and his dog

Mocha and me. Not sure whose nose is bigger.

Ephipanies come in small packages

So I took my dog to the park so she could run around and burn off the cookies I'm not supposed to feed her. I take her to the park because they have fenced in area where she can play without me worrying about her running off. She's a bad dog sometimes. Anyway, I'm walking around this field and look down and laying there in the grass, for God knows what reason, is a hammer.

I'm not speaking metaphorically. It was an actual hammer. Just laying there.

I start wondering why a hammer is just laying there in the grass for no reason, imagining all sorts of scenarios that might have caused it to be there. Eventually I get around to having that folk song "If I had a hammer" stuck in my head.

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening ... all over this land

Basically, if I had a hammer I would piss off the neighbors by hammering all the time.

That's not actually what the song is about, of course. It's a what if I had what I needed to accomplish something, then I'd actually do it. I start wondering what I'd do if I had a hammer. But then, now I actually do have a hammer. It's laying there in the grass right before me, for God knows what reason. I start to pick it up, but stop.

I realized that if I did have a hammer, I'd do nothing. There's nothing I want to do. I actually want to do — nothing. Not nothing as in the absence of something, but rather nothing in that it doesn't look anything like what could be misinterpreted as something. This doesn't make sense. Here, this is what I mean:

Winnebago + Laptop + WiFi + War Driving = That's me.

I want what Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau described as "a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence". I mean, come on, why not? For the first time in history all the tech is there to make that happen, to be connected to the world without, you know, being connected to the world. Mobile phones give you a number that you can take with you. Email handles the correspondence. WiFi and ripping off people's broadband connections (commercial services are fine too) means that you never have to literally be plugged in anywhere. Decentralized business models aren't tied to any particular location. Your reading this wherever you are. The server's in San Antonio, I think. I'm writing from the boon docks of Kentucky. Most everything's outsourced to India anyway. The world's become nonlocal, why shouldn't I?

Winnebago and a laptop and I'm gone, a geeky nomad skipping from hotspot to hotspot, doing nothing in particular. Nothing, as in no-thing. Why? Well, for no other reason than I want to do everything and don't want to be tied down to any particular one thing.

So, I thought, if I had a hammer... I'd leave it right where I found it. And that's what I did.

Life goes online

Or I could just show you what I mean when I say depth is better. Check out this preview for the Encyclopedia of Life:



Now that's depth web! I'd love to see the content management system running that thing. MediaWiki blows by comparison.

Depth web versus shallow web

I've mentioned before (and will probably come back to) the idea that the web is all about depth exploration of a topic. No stand-alone topic is completely stand-alone, but rather linked to back stories and related information and virtually every side-notion imaginable. It can get really deep. Perhaps the best example of this is Wikipedia, where everything eventually ends up as a blue link to everything else. It's a seemingly endless click adventure that if pursued indefinitely will bring you back to the beginning knowing everything you could possibly know about a topic. Like I said, it's depth exploration.

That's the good web in a nutshell. Almost every web application is designed around this idea of seeing how many turtles down you can get.

Almost.

Some systems are better than others at depth treatment, but surprisingly there's at least one that doesn't even try. The opposite of depth exploration is flatland shallowness. It's called Twitter.

Twitter is instant updates in 140 characters or less of what you're doing at any given moment. You can share this log with your friends who (for some odd reason) might actually be interested in what you're doing at any given moment. Sounds kind of cool. It's totally webby in that it's broadcasting your life in real-time. It's also kind of creepy, but that's alright. It's not like voyeurism and the web haven't met before. I like it because it's challenging to continually express what you're doing in Haiku moments.

Example:
Went to Walmart. Bought a case of Dasani because local tap water tastes like pesticides. Wondering why the floor is sticky. <-123 characters

If every random thought that crosses your mind demands utterance, that's the idea behind Twitter. It's actually Twitter's saving grace. It's kind of a nifty concept keeping a log of random thoughts. Unfortunately it's also horizontal, flatland, and shallow.

The crucial feature that Twitter is lacking (Web 2.0 entrepreneurs take notice, as this is how to make a Twitter plus) is an automatic way of linking these random thoughts to other random thoughts, thereby creating a depth narrative. That's how the brain works, after all. No idea is an isolated thing. Each thought is intrinsically linked to other thoughts. Our brains automatically process information relative to previously stored information. Sticky floors instantly conjure up memories of that time you went to the movies, which is linked to that first kiss in the back row, which is linked to that trip you took with that girl you kissed, which is linked to the more mundane thought of buying Mountain Dew when you stopped to get gas, and now we're back to Dasani and water tasting like pesticides. Then we're off to explore another tangent. The whole process creates this depth story stemming from a seemingly shallow account of going to Walmart, expressed in a post of less than 140 characters.

That would be really cool, bordering on a blueprint for artificial intelligence, but we don't even have to stretch it that far. It's enough to say that if Twitter is to accurately represent the stream of consciousness of all us twits, it needs depth. Otherwise, it's just the Andy Warhol painting of Web 2.0. A bit of a novelty, but completely shallow.

I don't want to run a coffee house, but if I did...

I sometimes toy with the idea of opening a coffee house. I wouldn't do it around here. It would have to be in a place that would attract the kind of people I'd want to hang around for eight hours a day. I'm not exactly sure where that would be, but it's definitely not here. I'm only half into the idea as well. Like Gary Trudeau, "I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence." That's why I'm in the web biz. You don't actually have to be there for that. Most of my clients lately are in California.

Still, I've had a love of coffee houses long before everyone wanted one, long before Starbucks took over. I used to hang out at Sitwell's on Ludlow Ave. in the Clifton Gaslight District of Cincinnati, back when they were in the basement, back when they were dingy -er. I would hop the Metro just to hang out at Sitwell's and visit the New World Bookshop down the street.

I l-o-v-e coffee. I was totally Seattle in the '90s though I've never actually been there. I did work as a barista briefly, but that was just for a couple of days. I tried to get a job at Sitwell's once, but I don't think I had enough piercings. All my tattoos are boringly covered.

Some possible names for the coffee house [never] to be:

Revolutions - because every modern revolution came from a bunch of disgruntled guys sitting around a cafe, plotting over black coffee. The decor would be all beatnik and have at least a few black and white photos of... well, disgruntled guys plotting over black coffee. I probably wouldn't go this route. It's all a little too Marxist. Obviously if I'm running a coffee house where I'm charging $3 for a cappuccino, I'm no Marxist.

The Bodhi Tree - named for the tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. This would be awesome because I'd settle for no less than a huge fig tree growing in the middle of the room, like twenty feet high at least, in a solarium with the coffee house built around it. Around the tree would be a carpet of floor pillows. Scratch that. That's my ideal house!

Geeked Internet Cafe - No one I know likes this name but me, and I don't know why. It's a great name for an internet cafe because you've got all the geeky toys, computers, games, whatever, and everyone's getting geeked out on coffee. Every night there'd be a LAN party. I would personally drive hours to visit a place called Geeked, but then again, I am a geek.

All of the above was to explain my obsession with coffee so I can link it to my obsession with art. I'm trying (unsuccessfully so far) to create latte art like these:



It's harder than it looks. I've got a decent espresso machine, but like any other art it requires a pesky thing called skill.

view more latte art / learn how to make your own

The five bucks butterfly effect

I don't remember exactly where I got this idea, but I think it comes from a book project I read about in a magazine a few years back. If someone finds a link to it, please shoot me an email. It's enough to say that it's not an original idea, just a project I've been wanting to do for some time, but can't afford just yet.

The basic idea for this project stems from the butterfly effect in chaos theory, that the flapping of butterfly's wings might ultimately lead to a tornado appearing miles away. It's the idea that the tiniest action can cause a ripple effect leading to big results. In this application, we're looking to cause one person to smile, which causes another to smile, and another, and so on — leading to a viral goodness that goes on and on. It doesn't take a system's theorist to realize that if someone cuts you off on the way to work, the chances of you having a good day are slimmed, and that your bad day is infectious to those around you. This is meant to counteract that.

It's a five dollar bill and a self-addressed stamped postcard left in a phone booth, on a park bench, a bathroom stall, or tacked to the community bulletin board at the grocery store. The card reads, "Smile, you're five dollars richer. Blow it on whatever you want but please drop a note to let us know how it goes." I want to put 100 - 200 of these around town in the oddest of places. Part of it is to brighten people's day, the other part is to just do something odd. It's not an easter egg hunt. They'll be conspicuous. The idea, though, is to go for the unexpected.

Imagine sitting on the bench at a bus stop and noticing a five dollar bill and postcard next to you. What would you spend it on? I'd probably consider it a good fortune and buy five scratch off lottery tickets myself. Then again, you are at a bus stop. Bus fare maybe? Cappucino? A magazine? Taco Bell? Five dollars doesn't go very far these days, but hopefully it's enough to buy a smile.

I don't know. That's the idea behind the postcards. I'd love to hear how it's actually spent, or what effect it causes. It's worth the five hundred to a thousand dollars to find out. The article I recall getting this idea from was about collecting these stories and compiling them into a book. They put out thousands of these bill/postcard combos. I can't afford their budget, but when I have a grand to blow, I'm definitely doing this. Maybe I'll post the responses I get back to a blog or something. Even if I don't get anything back, that's fine too. I'm fairly confident that it'll brighten someone's day, and who can put a real price tag on that? Five bucks butterfly effect might be worth billions in good moods.

Kevin Rose is a hero and Digg users should be buried

I support Kevin Rose as an Internet hero.

If you're the least bit interested, by now you've already heard the backstory. An Internet revolt hit Digg this week and hit it hard. Poor Digg went from innocent bystander in the debate over Digital Rights Management (DRM) to an active participant in a matter of hours, and not by their own choice. It was the will of their community.

A quick summary of what happened: Someone cracked the AACS scheme used to encrypt data on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. Someone posts the hex code to Digg. Hollywood sends out cease-and-desist orders to remove posts citing the encryption key from websites including Digg. Digg initially complies with the order, removing postings and banning users. According to a statement by Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, "We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code." Civil disobediance erupts and washes over Digg's front page claiming censorship and posting the hex code over and over. Within hours, every popular article on Digg is about the code, and administrators find themselves unable to keep up.

Here's the heroic moment: In the midst of this civil disobedience Kevin Rose decided to side with the vision of Digg, at risk of losing it all.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

This is no small thing. Conservative estimates last year put Digg's worth at $200 million, though by some estimates it may be worth as much as $500 million. That was last year. I'm sure it's worth much more now. To be willing to risk all of that on the idea that Digg is ran by its community is heroic. That is the vision, after all. Community submitted news stories, ranked by the community, and moderated by the community. It is entirely community. Unfortunately, as Wired put it, "Live by the community, die by the community." The heroic moment is when Kevin Rose agreed.

I haven't seen anything this inspiring in some time, considering the woes of the world. Kevin Rose is a hero because when put to the test, he sided with his original idea even after the idea became more than it originally was. While other Web 2.0 companies cave to other interests as soon as the money starts rolling (MySpace comes to mind), Digg has remained true to itself through its founder.

Unfortunately, the situation isn't all-inspiring however...

Digg users are assholes

Kevin Rose is the hero, not Digg users. Digg users are assholes. They proved that pretty clearly.

Rose came up with the idea for Digg back when he was hosting Screen Savers on TechTV (I was a fan then and I am now). Digg was founded as a tech news site in response to Slashdot, where content is controlled by the editors. Rose had met with the Slashdot people while working on Screen Savers and asked why they couldn't just let the readers decide what content they want to see on the home page. For whatever reason, Slashdot rejected the idea that is now the core feature of Digg. A short time later, the first version of Digg appeared based on this idea that news could be social. The other essential idea is that, when given the responsibility of controlling what news is placed on the front page, users would act responsibly. For the most part this has been the case, and Digg is generally seen to be successful. As such, Digg has become an important mark in the history of the Internet and the publishing of information as a whole.

How sad is it then that when put to the test, Digg's user base ends up behaving like a bunch of children crying over their toy being taken away. DRM is a hot controversial topic in tech. Many tech enthusiasts are against it. Naturally some person would eventually post the code, but it's not the end of the world if Digg removes it. The response was very childish. How so? Instead of revolting against the MPAA, instead of revolting against DRM in general, instead of pressing Congress or traditional media to get policies changed, users revolted against the very site that is more in line with their way of thinking, ie. openness.

I mean the whole idea behind Digg was that users could responsibly control front page content. You don't even see user controlled front page content at Wikipedia. That's controlled by a few select editors. Slashdot is controlled by editors. All the other news sites are also controlled by editors. Why attack the very guys that are most on your side? The blog posts as this all went down reflect the childlike response. It was a schoolyard frenzy. "Look at what we're doing, ha ha" and a bunch of patting themselves on the back. Did anyone stop to think that they were potentially destroying one of the most open networks available? It's kind of absurd to think that this was supposedly done out of the notion that content should be more open. It came off looking more like a temper tantrum.

A lot of asshole behavior is what I saw.

Kevin Rose is the only hero in this. When he stood up and said, for better or worse, and with millions on the line, we will side with the users, that's pretty amazing especially since the users turned out to be assholes.

All set for world domination

Not really. I just wanted to post a notice that I'm all done moving over the new server. Sorry if I ignored your email (at best) or lost your email (at worst) in the process. I now have an ungodly amount of space, like giggity, giggity, gigabytes worth, so I might do some more 3-D animation work.

My new theme song, "Code Monkey"

I have a new theme song, being the code monkey that I am:

"Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton. Dance by Emily.

Met George Clooney's dad, decided to stop genocide

My phone cam sucks, but that's Nick Clooney on stage, father of George Clooney. He lives in the next town over so when I heard that he was going to do a presentation on Darfur tonight at the local college, I figured it'd be crazy to pass up the chance to hear him speak. Mr. Clooney is famous in his own right as a journalist, anchorman, game show and American Movie Classics host. He has over 50 years experience in the news business and was the inspiration for his son George to make the movie Good Night and Good Luck, a film about newsman Edward R. Murrow.

A year ago, Nick and George Clooney traveled to Darfur to help raise the profile on this horrible situation that can only be described as genocide. An estimated 3.6 million people have been affected by the crisis with over 400,000 dead since the conflict began. Nick and his son George spent nine days in the region filming a documentary about the horrors refugees face there every moment of their lives. It was crazy to hear the stories they encountered. As just one off-the-wall example, Mr. Clooney was talking about how women were routinely raped as they went to gather firewood. When asked why they sent women to gather firewood instead of the men, considering the dangers, they replied simply that the men would just be killed. What an unfathomable world where one has to choose rape over death just to get firewood.

This is a non-partisan issue. Even Bush is on board. It's not by any means insolvable either. Something I didn't know: a UN resolution allows for UN soldiers to step in and end the conflict. The only hold out is China. Pressure China and this could be over, like yesterday. There are people dying there today, everyday. It's both senseless and fixable.

Here's Nick and George Clooney talking about the documentary:


The Clooneys are incredibly down to earth despite their fortune and fame. You may have heard of the famous singer Rosemary Clooney (who also starred in White Christmas). That's Nick's sister and George's aunt. She died a few years back and shortly after they had a festival in her honor downtown, to which George Clooney paid a visit. I got to meet him and get his autograph. He's a very nice guy in person.

I got to meet Nick Clooney after his Darfur presentation tonight as well, shook his hand, and told him thanks. We were leaving at the same time and he actually held the door open for me. That's pretty cool. As I was returning home, I noticed he was in the other lane and snapped this photo:



I hope it's not too paparazzi of me, but I think it speaks to the man's character that with all the fame in his family, he still drives a Lincoln Continental bought at Northgate Lincoln-Mercury in Cincinnati. That's pretty down to earth. I'm a better man for having met him because I'm now resolved to do what I can to help in the Darfur cause, but I would have been better having met him anyway.

How you can help Darfur