Dana Blankenhorn

A Stand Up Guy

Republicans are having a primary fight right now that should rewrite some history books.

The assumption is that Republicans follow orders, while Democrats all want to lead the parade. Republicans vote with their heads, Democrats with their hearts.

So, Mitt Romney. It's his turn. He finished second last time, McCain lost, so it's his turn. He's got the money, he's got the looks, he's got the money, he's got the endorsements. And if his personality has a Nixon problem -- he's uncomfortable around people -- well so did Nixon. And if those Kennedys hadn't stolen 1960 Nixon never would have lost (and may have never gone paranoid).

But if Mitt Romney is the GOP ego, Newt Gingrich is its id.

Newt is still in this race because of one man, a guy I once worked for. Sheldon Adelson. Adelson cares about one issue and one issue only -- fealty to Israel and whatever Israel wants. The big story no one is writing is that Newt Gingrich has pledged such fealty, and he has $10 million (so far) to show for it.

But leave that aside. Other than Shelly's money, what is Newt Gingrich? You've got a man who was a politician for a quarter-century but who has actually spent the last 14 years in entertainment. He writes books, he talks in front of crowds or TV cameras.

He's a stand-up. As in stand-up comic. He's been doing it most of his life -- it was what propelled him into the House Speaker's chair, the idea that he could vamp on camera, keep the attention of the nation focused on him, defy Presidents (starting with Bush the greater) and leave 'em laughing. Not all of 'em, but his people, his audience.

It's just what every stand-up comic does. The secret to a stand-up's success is finding his people and cultivating that audience. Jeff Foxworthy never appeared on Def Comedy Jam. Dave Chappelle was not part of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

Your audience can be very narrow, or it can be very broad, like that of Russell Peters. Its devotion could be an inch thick or a mile deep. You can fly across the sky like a meteor, a la Bill Hicks (left, above), or you can hang in there and become a legend, like Bill Cosby.

Of course there's a less charitable way to put this.

A Tebow or Two

Just a few words about the  Tim Tebow phenomenon. With no politics.

Tebow has managed to reverse the way we talk about the quarterback position, and about athletes and race. Funny how no one noticed.

As recently as 10 years ago, when Michael Vick and Donovan McNabb were kids, black quarterbacks were described as "athletic" and white ones as "heady." It was a racist presumption, based on the fact that both Vick and Donovan were fast, agile runners while top white quarterbacks like Tom Brady and Brett Favre would drop back, survey the defense, and sling it.

This racism pervaded the whole sport. It was assumed that blacks were best in the "athletic" positions, whites in the positions requiring smarts. And this, in turn, was used as an excuse to maintain racism in the coaching ranks -- it still pervades college coaching. There were very few white linebackers, and even fewer white running backs.

Tebow puts the lie to all this. He's athletic as can be, and in football terms he's as dumb as a post. He doesn't look at three or four choices, as Tom Brady does. He looks at one, or pretends to look at one while actually planning on going the other way. He also runs a lot. He's athletic and he's quick.

Meanwhile, McNabb and Vick have grown up to be fairly heady people, in a football sense. McNabb became a thrower later in his career, and Vick's always had the gun. Whatever you think of them as men (and many Atlantans and pet lovers will never see Vick as anything but a thug) the fact is they're seen as quarterbacks. This has opened the way to a host of mediocre black quarterbacks -- Tavaris Jackson, David Gerrard being just two names that come to mind.

Point is that Tebow is an athlete. He's not a quarterback. He's white, not black. Black guys can be heady and white guys can be athletes. An accomplishment of a curious sort.

Oh, and go Wednesday. Now we return you to your regularly-scheduled tech blog.

Solving the NBA Lock Out

The problem with the NBA isn't 47% or 53%. It's not the mid-cap exception. It's not the distrust of owners like Michael Jordan and players like Derek Fisher.

The problem is that revenues aren't growing. The problem is a lot of clubs aren't making a profit.

So here's a modest proposal.

Expansion. To the Far East.

Right now there are 30 teams. Add two. Sell them, maybe to Shanghai and Beijing. Now you sell six existing clubs to entrepreneurs in Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul and Osaka.

See, Michael Jordan gets out of Charlotte. The Sacramento Kings are no longer your problem. The Milwaukee Bucks become the Yuan. Every other small market team is shivering wondering if they'll be next, and three will be.

The Core of Corruption in “College” Football

Everyone knows college football is corrupt. It always has been.

But as another season kicks off, with more poor kids getting their knees, backs and heads stoved-in for the entertainment of rich alumni, it's a good time to note the source of that corruption.

The NFL.

Football is the only collegiate sport that serves as the sole minor league for its professional game. Yes, there are NBA basketball players on some campuses, but most are just passing through for a year. Seniors are usually second-rounders. Some baseball players go pro, but you can choose to sign right out of high school, and most clubs prefer that you do. Future pros are scattered among the other sports, although you know what they call collegiate womens' gymnastics don't you – the senior tour.

Only in football (American football you dork, not soccer) does the pro sport depend on the college sport to train its employees. A few kids have gone early, but most turn into negative examples. No, the techniques, the training, the coaching, the schemes – the pro game is college dependent. (Thus the league imposed an NCAA penalty on Terrelle Pryor when he left Ohio State, suspending him for five pro games. In poker that is called a tell.)

The Best Journalist In The World

It's not me. It's no one who was trained in the field.

It's this guy. Anthony Bourdain. A cook.

At the heart of all the best journalist is that you go to the heart of the story, that you invest yourself in the story you're telling, and that you change as the reader or viewer changes. 

This is what Bourdain does. It's what no one else does, because we're all trained to be detached, like cops, or given the concept of a “false equivalency,” which makes all actions by anyone equally valid. Which is crazy.

What made Bourdain a journalist was his Beirut show in 2006.  As he said, he went there as a snarky chef out to stuff his face and have a good time. He left it as a refugee, in an American warship. You can actually see the change take hold of him as the show goes on.

It never left. We can all be thankful for that. Because when you watch the run of his shows since then, he's a different man, with a different mission. Instead of having “fixers” show him where the good restaurants are, now he works to find sources who can tell him the story of a place. And then he sits, and he listens, and in the editing room he explains.

It's beautiful.

Tyler Perry's Sweet Auburn

While riding back from the Georgia Capitol yesterday  I detoured (as I often do) past the King Center.

What I noticed is that there was a bigger crowd by the MLK Birth Home than at the center itself, where Dr. King and Coretta are now buried, side-by-side. And the atmosphere at the home was different as well. It was festive, alive, without the reverence found at the grave site.

There's a reason for that. With the passage of time we see, not just the tragedy of Dr. King's death, but the wonder of the life preceding it, and we're curious about it.

The home itself isn't much of a much. It dates from the time of my own home. It's a two-story wood structure very similar in design to many of the infill homes going into my own neighborhood.

So I get this idea.

Internet killed the Video Star

All the brouhaha over Keith Olbermann obscured a key point.

More people now get their news and opinion from this medium, the Internet, than from TV.

More people now watch top YouTube videos than watch most TV shows, yes even network shows.

DailyKos now has over 278,000 registered subscribers on its RSS feed. This compares very favorably with the 876,000 who subscribe to CNN's world news feed. (Kos is almost entirely an American operation.) There is a DailyKos TV blog in beta. TalkingPointsMemo (TPM) has about 50,000 on its feed. MSNBC has 600,000.

I mention all this because Markos Moulitsas, unlike most in the liberal blogosphere (and like Josh Marshall, who runs TPM) is an entrepreneur. Compare Kos' numbers to those of Nick Denton, who gets all sorts of publicity for Gawker Media's entrepreneurial smarts, and you're in for a surprise - Gawker has only 55,000 on its list. (This blog, for those counting at home, has 61 subscribers.)

What's it take to do TV these days? TMZ has only 73,000 subscribers.

Admiration

When I was young I envied rich and famous writers, hoping (and maybe expecting) I might be one some day.

I'm not. I'm competent, and my Internet readers know me well. But you're a small band – perhaps a few hundred regulars in all. You're not growing. I'm not on TV, I don't write books. I realized some time ago I am what I am, a journalist working the backwaters of technology, listening to sources and parroting what they say.

But I have learned, in my maturity, to admire those who can do more, even when they started out well behind me.

Take Anthony Bourdain. He's near my age and admits to having taken just the wrong path through life. He was a druggie cook for about two decades, his lungs always filled with smoke, his late nights (by his own admission) filled with cocaine and heroin.

Then at about age 40, he got angry, he got frustrated, he decided he wanted more. He sat down and started writing, hating the fame and pretension around him, vowing to tell just the truth and to never “sell out” like “that little ewok” Emeril, the Food Network, the whole celebrity-chef gourmet scene.

The result was “Kitchen Confidential,” a classic which told the truth about American kitchen life. Brutally honest, howlingly funny, with a unique voice that (it turned out) poured right out of him, unedited, whenever you talked to him.

College athletics is all politics

The big mistake made by sportswriters looking at college athletics is to over-estimate the extent to which their stories are about money, when they're really all about political influence.

Fact. College athletics does not contribute directly to the education enterprise. All the money that goes in stays in. It's either paid to coaches in salary or goes into facilities. 

For kids, college athletics is a money sink. As more schools find they have to play the political game of college athletics, kids are charged for it.

My own son, now at Georgia State, is having to pay $85 per semester this year so GSU can field a football team. Why? Because football makes them a player in the legislature. It means they're no longer just a "commuter school" but a big-time competitor for funding alongside Georgia Tech, Georgia Southern and the University of Georgia.

That's what college athletics is about. It's about winning the loyalty of legislatures for the rest of a school's agenda. When the big state school dominates the headlines, it dominates funding. That's the money sportswriters should be following, not the TV contracts but the appropriations.

We can beat England

We can also get drubbed 5-0.

But the U.S. can win their game next Saturday. Here's why.