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Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Tuesday Deadline Linkdump
Of particular interest on Vermont blogs this week:
• Winter driving tips from Maple Mama.
• Former Burlington City Councilor Haik Bedrosian shares his first-person account of the Democratic and Green caucuses this week in Burlington. If you want to know more about Haik, visit his informative About Me page, where he reveals, among other things, that he has shaken hands with Bill Clinton three times, and used to be a Burlington cab driver. Says Haik,
"I drove the night shift for Benway's Taxi during the summer of 1995. I only had two pukers that whole time- one out the door, and another on himself but not the cab. I was lucky when it came to passengers vomiting. I took one woman to a safehouse where she was hiding from the 'father of her children' who had bound and stabbed. "He stuck me like a pig." she told me. I drove one guy to the jail behind Denny's, he was using a lighter to seal the plastic from a cigarette pack around a nug which he explained would be going up his ass. Ah.. the night shift.
Of course, he also reserves the right to lie on his blog, so make of that what you will.
• Cartoonist Alison Bechdel recently put her 18-year-old cat to sleep. She drew this very sad little sketch diary to illustrate just how lonely she's become.
• What's with all the atheism posts? We've got Bill, Charity, and Five Before Chaos — now Christian blogger Ed Cyzewski weighs in.
• His title: "The view out my window." My title: "My father is now a Freemason."
• And finally, Mistress Maeve offers advice to all you Widows of Warcraft.
January 16, 2007 at 02:49 PM in VT Blogs | Permalink
Comments
Hi Cathy. Thanks for the Ink. Although my blog's disclaimer lets me lie, I really only have lied once.
Sure I've told jokes and done bad impersonations, but the one time I actually lied was when I blogged about taking notes with crayons at a Bob Kiss Campaign event last year. The truth is they were Crayola brand markers, not crayons. I said crayons because it helped move the "kid-friendly" narrative.
Once Philip Baruth picked up on that very line about the crayons and blogged it, I knew I could never tell anyone the truth about the markers.
We shouldn't lose the forest for the trees regarding my particular style of disclaimer, however. Lying is only one of the things it lets me get away with. The disclaimer was informed by my pre-BP experience at iburlington, where I realized Brian Brown, and all editors really, have an ethical dilemma posed to them each time they decide to publish or not. Even in an open forum like iburlington, there are always some rules, like those against threats and profanity. Furthermore, one has to have a set of ethics and standards when it comes to deciding if when and how to amend already published work. Do you tell people you changed it? Do you leave it and add an addendum? And what if a flow of comments is interrupted, but would read perfectly if you just swapped the temporal order of two of them?
Once an editor sets a precedent in any of these regards, he or she has to waste time trying to adhere to it consistently in a world where that’s ultimately impossible. Still, to be ethical you really have to try, unless you have a disclaimer like mine. It’s incredibly liberating. I would never blog without it for free, and I would never give it up to get paid. So there you have it.
But let me just assure you. All the cab stories are true, and that’s not the half of it.
Posted by: Haik Bedrosian | Jan 16, 2007 11:15:59 PM
You should blog more about the cab stories.
Posted by: cresmer | Jan 17, 2007 7:35:08 AM
Thanks for the link to my winter driving tips! I might have to write a follow-up since buying a new car last weekend (YES, a 4WD!).
My previous car predated daytime running lights - so I didn't know, for instance, that they don't include your tail lights. So in bad weather, you actually need to turn you lights on to be seen.
Thanks, again!
Posted by: MapleMama | Jan 18, 2007 4:13:16 PM
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