June 2008

The Joy of Publishing...

Well, another milestone. (Not millstone, mind you... nothing hanging around my neck.)

No, I've been published in a Net-based filmmaking magazine. Huzzah!

The site www.microfilmmaker.com has published the series of articles on beginning filmmaking I wrote here in issue number 31 of their publication. My byline, picture, and everything!

Here's the link, just so you can see for yourself: The link. 

Cool, eh?

Cheers!

Al B.

Tim Russert - Reflections...

{So this doesn't strictly adhere to my guidelines I laid down at the beginning. Well? It's my blog, and if I want to do this with it, then what of it?}

I hadn't had the noisybox on since we saw the putative weather front scheduled to come through town this morning. When I went downstairs for dinner, Megan had booted her computer up and seen the bulletin that Tim Russert had died suddenly.

This was something of a shock to both of us; he was only 58 years old, just a few years older than me.

I had seen his work on NBC's political coverage, and on his regular weekly stand, Meet the Press. He was tough, funny, fair, and when a politician or a figure in the news tried weasel-wording his way around one of Russert's questions, the lights would go on in Russert's eyes like the backplane of a pinball machine about to tilt.

I freely admit that Meet the Press was not one of my regularly watched shows; I prefer the deceptive bonhomie of CBS's Bob Schieffer, host of Face the Nation, with George Stephanopolous's This Week on ABC a distant third. (This is primarily because I think George Will is a pompous windbag, and I avoid him as I avoid door-to-door religious tract distributors, guys trying to sell wholesale meat from a freezer truck, and relatives trying to borrow money.)

In fact, one of my lasting memories of the show was back in the days of Lawrence Spivak, the founding host of the program. I always knew it was coming on by the opening chords of Beethoven crashing from the speakers on our old TV.

I do think that Russert was occasionally too combative, but that might be explained by his previous job working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former Senator from New York, who was the consummate Irish politician. Russert learned well.

It's said, of speaking of the recently deceased, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum"; Of the dead, speak only of the good. Maybe that was true when the quote in question was first written, back in the days of the Roman Republic, but in these days of instant character assassination, nonexistent fact-checking, and no checks and balances on whatever someone wants to say, that's more honored in the breach than in the observance.

More's the pity.

Tim Russert didn't operate that way, and for that, I salute him. Ave atque vale, Timothy J. Russert, Jr.; we may well not see your like again, and that's a damnable shame.

Cheers!

Al B.