Caw! Caw!

Rook gets sentimental about unusual things.

A follower of politics since we first were free of the nest, we watched Meet the Press quite a bit during the tenure of Mr Russert, and more religiously in these days of DVRs and Video Podcasts. There are political reporters, and then there are Political Reporters. Mr Russert was, obviously afforded the stature of the latter.

Qualifying what made him a giant among men is difficult. Was it his ability to pierce through the noise and accurately predict where the wind was blowing? Was it his ability to moderate a discussion between two sides that would rather scream and throw furniture at each other?

These things were part of what made him great, but Rook’s favorite quality of Mr Russert was a quick, saavy mind that allowed him to interview politicians and make them squirm when they were asked questions they never saw coming exposing their lies and half truths, and his ability to expose them for who they truly were for all the world to see.

The world needs more Political Reporters like Mr Russert, and sadly, Rook doesn’t see many even approaching his stature out there on the landscape today.

Mr Russert, you will be missed.

Rook has been ‘left behind’ the last few years. By Facebook.

If you don’t know what Facebook is, well, we congratulate you on a life well lived and direct you to return to the book you’ve been reading. You’re a happier person than us for your naivete no doubt.

“Rook!” our friends say “You’ll never believe what Person A wrote on my Facebook wall!”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Rook is likely to reply.

“They wrote that they smelled their fingers after they pooped!”

“How… compelling.”

Rook has no problem with crazy birds who smell themselves after they’ve pooped. Rook has no problem with writing about it on the internet, either. Why, when we were a younger bird, we used to write about… no, no, you’ll be getting none of that. You’d have to have known us then. It was glorious, we tell you.

You might think Rook has an issue with the useless ‘Apps’ that populate Facebook. No, no, they’re fine. Sometimes, they even do useful things, like importing shared items from another service or allow friend to see your Calendar of upcoming appointments, which is no doubt a thrilling way to have your girlfriends feel closer to you when you’re getting that cyst checked out on Thursday morning. It’ll even import your twitter feed so you can talk about how violated you feel after they do the ultrasound.

Rook prefers the vampire game, anyway. He just loves biting people while they’re at the Doctor.

Rook’s real issue with Facebook is that it produces very little usable data.

Before Facebook and it’s hairier, uglier big brother MySpace showed up on the scene, RSS was the hot buzzword. RSS was great, because RSS gave you the data from your friends Blog, or LiveJournal, or Flickr, and packaged it up in a format that you could reuse elsewhere, programatically. What this meant was I could build a customized portal with all my friends feeds right there, or more often, I could use a service like Google Reader or BlogLines to follow my friends. Didn’t matter if they were on LiveJournal, or Blogger, or Xanga, or had their own blog on their website.

RSS delivered the web at the users’s feet, or at least where it was told to be delivered.

Facebook will read RSS feeds if you want it to. Its got 4 or 5 applications (AT LEAST!) for dealing with RSS feeds. But it’s very stingy with its data. Getting most of it out requires programming chops, unless someone’s done it for you already — and good luck, because Facebook Apps have one purpose: to keep the user on Facebook.

So Rook will stay in our little RSS universe enveloped by Google Reader, and our RSS feeds, and allow the vampires to bite each other without us. Left behind, and glad to be there.

You can go back to smelling your fingers now.

Rook is quite pleased to find out that one of his favorite novels, Ubik, is soon to be a movie, but we ask ourselves if the public is ready for it.

Ubik was written by Philip K Dick, who also wrote the basis for Blade Runner, Minority Report, Paycheck, and A Scanner Darkly. (Rook only links the ones worth seeing.) If you know anything about these movies, you know that Dick’s writing is … explorative, to say the least. Ubik is perhaps one of his most ‘out there’ works, and making a movie from it will be a monumental task, to say the least.

Rook hopes for the best, and perhaps a Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said movie.

Rook pays to much attention to politics.

We were never a big fan of Bill Clinton, but he was consistently better than the alternatives, and had the added advantage of not screwing things up too badly. He pandered a bit too much for Rook’s tastes, but he knew how the game of politics was played — and that was why he managed to keep himself in office, despite himself.

Hillary Clinton is no different, and perhaps a bit shrewder because of her experience with Bill’s campaigns. This is why I find the news reports today of Hillary “vowing to press on” after yet another night of the probability she can pull this rabbit out of her hat slipping away.

Maybe too much of his thinking is influenced by Robert Anton Wilson and the X-files, but Rook has suspected something for a few weeks that seems to be gaining popularity out there in the wider world: She’s running to destroy Obama, so she can face off against McCain in 2012.

It’s an audacious plan. It’s a diabolic plan, and if somehow it succeeds, Hillary Clinton will go down as one of the shrewdest politicans in decades, up there with Richard Nixon. She’s safe, as a Senator from New York, until at least 2012, and probably beyond. She’ll remain in the public eye all this time, with the perfect platform to criticize President McCain (or, one could also imagine, President Obama) and regain momentum for a run in 2012.

Perhaps we’re paranoid, but Hillary has eaten, breathed, and slept politics for over 30 years — and she is not ready to quit, even with taking back the White House for the Democrats.

Rook hopes he’s wrong.