Dogged Blog

And I thought my hate mail was bad...

I get a fair amount of hate mail, generally from people who don't believe in amputating dogs' legs, spending money on veterinary bills, or  lesbianism.

I once heard from someone who felt... I can hardly bring myself to type this... that Lucy Lawless cannot sing.

Gina and I both frequently get hate mail from the vocal minority that hates all pets and believes that those of us who write about them are going to the hot place, and as far as they're concerned, the sooner the better.

Lastly, I get a lot of hate mail over at PetHobbyist.com from people who believe that actually enforcing our Terms of Service is an act infringing on their most precious liberties. I believe a lot of them think I should go to the hot place, too.

But the next time I'm feeling sorry for myself about any of that, I'm going to read media god Mark Morford's hate mail, because you know? People really, really hate him. Case in point:

Conservative values and the people who adhere to them are going to crush you liberals. I don't care if you do elect Hillary, which you won't, we will crush you. I despise liberal values, your cowardice and blind stupidity. We will finish you off. You are a danger to the country and with the help of talk radio we will destroy you. You are cockroaches, nothing else. Reading your newspaper is like paying the cops to beat you, then thanking them.

Feel the hate at SFGate.com.

Speaking of SFGate.com reminds me -- my column there ran a day late this time, because of the holiday Monday. It's a scintillating... SCINTILLATING, I TELL YOU!... piece on canine bladder infections.

If I absolutely swear to you it's interesting and even a bit funny, will you go read it? I'm arguing with someone in the comments section, too. And you know you love it when I do that.

If not, please direct all my hate mail to Mark Morford, kthnx.

It's all about ME

So, I have been having computer problems, but they seem to be fixed now, although some of my email is apparently lost and gone forever. If you emailed me in May and I didn't respond, please try again -- it's history, babe.

My interview with HGTV's David Bromstad is out on AfterElton.com today:

Whether they're demonstrating their willingness to eat worms, whip up a soufflé, get a makeover, or have their living room redecorated with items currently languishing in their own garages, reality TV has always been a pretty good place for the gays. Striking a note more of gentle subversion than in-your-face sensationalism, most of the home decorating, cooking and fashion makeover shows treat queer guests and contestants pretty much just like everyone else. 

The Home and Garden Network is no exception, regularly fixing the severe organizational problems and real-estate woes of same-sex couples without batting an eye. And when they decided to do a home decorating reality competition show called Design Star, they didn't bat an eye that one of the contestants — and its ultimate winner — was David Bromstad, an out gay designer from Miami.

David was a great interview, and I had a lot of fun talking to him.

And I was in USA Today this morning... me me me! And of course, Gina, Ben Huh from itchmo.com, Therese from PetSitUsa.com, and Kim from petfoodtracker.blogspot.com. Elizabeth Weise did a couple of pieces on the pet food recall and the pet power bloggers -- that's us, apparently -- and she singled me out not for my brilliant political commentary and powers of analysis, but my ability to type really really fast while liveblogging. Woe. Still, fame is fame:

Early on, there was extreme confusion about the number of pets that had been sickened or killed. The Food and Drug Administration had been reporting fewer than 20, while anecdotal reports indicated numbers well into the hundreds, if not thousands. In human cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would track such numbers. But there is no such reporting system in place for animals.

To fill the gap, the Pet Connection team created an online database where owners could list their pets, symptoms, outcome and veterinary information. The numbers stand at 2,527 cats and 2,365 dogs dead.

Because no "official" number has ever been released, their figures became the only ones available, and are likely to remain so until academic veterinarians begin publishing their research, which could take another year.

The site also started an innovation that became surprisingly popular — live transcripts of FDA phone news conferences. It was something of a shock to people listening in when they began getting e-mails about something a federal official had just said seconds before.

Pet Connection, it turned out, had elected its fastest typist, contributing editor Christie Keith, to "live blog" the teleconferences. She was typing a verbatim transcript onto the site as the officials spoke.

Thousands now log in for every press conference, Spadafori says.

Full article here, sidebar here.

I was also in the LA Times, which I didn't mention before because... ummm... well, I could lie and say modesty but I think it was more like exhaustion and overwork:

The pet food campaign has the hallmarks of other big blog-driven news stories, with dedicated crews of site owners highlighting, commenting on and linking to media reports and official statements. The bloggers dig out and post documents, such as the FDA's missive advising that pregnant investigators not examine human foods that the FDA has said repeatedly are safe, and they e-mail reporters, government officials, company executives and anyone else who might have a part in the story.

They listen in on FDA conference calls, patiently awaiting the rare chance that the agency's public relations staffers will call on them, and some "liveblog" their own running transcripts.

"I don't know of a comparable case," said Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor who writes the media criticism blog PressThink. "It shows what's possible when people get outraged and they ask themselves, what's happening here? They actually have the tools to start finding out."

[...]

Pet Connection, one of the larger sites that has devoted itself to recall issues, has the advantage of being organized by trained journalists who also write a syndicated pet column for newspapers around the country.

Their work now is a long way from what Gina Spadafori, the site's executive editor, and Christie Keith, a contributing editor and blogger on the site, were doing before the recall hit.

"In February, we were covering the latest in litter boxes at Global Pet Expo," Spadafori said. "And in March, I'm suddenly embroiled in an international trade story."

And my head is still spinning from that one. Full article by Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Abigail Goldman here.

My new banner

I was up WAY too late with my friend KT, and this whole "Girl Reporter" thing started and then, I don't know, I went to bed and got up in the morning and was all normal again, but KT, not so much, because she made me this Christie Keith, Girl Reporter banner for my blog.

I am CERTAIN when my parents sent me to journalism school, this is exactly what they had in mind...

Sunday afternoon crashing

If I had known on March 16 when Gina and I were talking on the phone about some of the horror stories we were hearing from vets about pets sick from eating recalled foods, and said to each other that we needed to dig more deeply into this story than the mainstream media was doing, that it would completely consume my life for the next three weeks... well, I might have tried to get more sleep.

I'm utterly sleep-deprived, have been neglecting other work, and let's not discuss the loads and loads of laundry piled reproachfully around my washer and dryer. Or the abbreviated walks that my dogs have had to put up with on most days.

I'm not complaining. My dogs are healthy and happy, if a bit bored. We're much better off than those whose pets were sickened or killed, or those who had to worry about having fed recalled foods.

I do have two new, non-pet-related articles coming out tomorrow on AfterElton.com - I'll link when they're up. One is a review of Alan Cumming's new film Suffering Man's Charity, and the other is my interview with Cumming, which I did in Austin at the South by Southwest Film Festival, where the film premiered.

Sometime this week, or perhaps next weekend, my review of the music documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, which I also saw at SXSW, will be going up on club.kingsnake.com, and an interview with some of the people involved with that project will be on AfterElton.com on April 16, or as we call it in America, TAX DAY. I did already blog my thanks to 30 Century Man director Stephen Kijak for turning me on to Emmylou Harris' 1995 album Wrecking Ball during our interview... it's totally brilliant and it was worth the entire trip to Austin just to hear it. You can read my fannish gushing here.

I also blogged the pet food recall story over at DKos, which earned me my first ever recommended diary over there. Thanks to everyone who recc'd me, and to the Kossaks who posted more than 500 comments on that diary. That this story is NOT "just a pet story" has been crystal clear to Gina and me from Day One, and one of the biggest frustrations we've had is seeing how many people chose to trivialize or ignore it.

Gina blogged on Pet Connection this morning about a CBS reporter who was complaining that too much time was being given to the pet food recall story at the expense of "real news" like the Iraq war:

No one’s denying the need for honest reporting on the war in Iraq, and I can’t imagine a person who doesn’t care about the sacrifices of our fellow citizens there, or indeed about the suffering of the Iraqis who are living and dying in a war zone.

[....]

This isn’t about 12, 14, 16 dead pets — or even, if you extrapolate from numbers such as Oregon’s, Michigan’s, Banfield’s, the Animal Medical Center, the Veterinary Information Network or even ours, hundreds or thousands dead. (The FDA has some 12,000 complaints to investigate, more than double in a month their two-year load on all other complaints combined. More on the numbers here.)

This is about our happenstance discovery of a vulnerability in our overall food-safety system, one that we’re fortunate to have found and to have a chance to fix before something else even bigger happens, either by accident (which this pet-food disaster may well surely end up being) or on purpose (at the hands of America’s enemies).

In a brilliant comment, MFEMFEM said the reporter "is being a bit disingenuous," and goes on to say:

As others have posted, if he had used the ridiculous coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death or the constant repetitive stories making light of dishonest, selfish, arrogant politicians prancing around Washington, or the constant diet of celebrity Pablum, I might have some empathy for his point of view.

The pet recall story involves corporate lies and deceit, woeful inaction by federal agencies, deception by major pet food manufacturers, the deaths of thousands of pets, the lack of security for food products entering our country, and the exposure of appalling production conditions in plants in China that export foodstuff to our country. The pet food story has NOTHING to do with lack of reporting about Iraq. I hope Mr. Pizzey is not upset because his own reporting may not be getting all the attention he feels it should. I hope he is not trying to subtly imply that what he sees as too much coverage of poisoned pet food is an example of lack of patriotism or lack of support for our armed forces (that card is getting a little old).

He may be right about the lack of reporting of the human suffering in Iraq, but his use of the pet food poisoning story to focus on that lack of coverage is way off base. He looks ridiculous for using the pet food poisonings as a basis for his complaints.

I’m willing to bet the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith was tens times that the pet food coverage, yet Mr. Pizzey is complaining about a REAL news story?

I should probably finish up with something that ties all these things together and impress you all with my writerly prowess, but I'm done.

I'm going to be on Anderson Cooper's show tonight

I will be on Anderson Cooper's show tonight on CNN, at 10:20 PM Eastern/7:20 PM Pacific, discussing the pet food recall story.

SXSW: It's now about caffeine

My feet don't hurt anymore. That's the good news.

There is not enough caffeine to get my brain functioning this morning. That's the reality.

So, we photo blog! This is me with the Ask a Ninja guys, Kent Nichols (left) and Douglas Sarine (right), at the club kingsnake booth at SXSW. In my hands is Gina's pretty little laptop that she should give to me.

Okay, back to staring morosely into my monitor wishing I were sleeping work.

SXSW boothmate blogging

club kingsnake's next door neighbors at SXSW are the guys from NeoFlix, Brian and JC. Over the years I've had a lot of friends who were and are filmmakers, and with one exception, not exactly the kind who have multi-picture deals with Disney. (Waving at Mike Solinger who totally sold out made it big.)

I love their project, because what they're doing is producing DVDs for independent filmmakers who want to distribute their films through their own websites and other marketing efforts, with a very low cost, low minimum run, and lots of backend support. It reminds me of some of the best of the "publish on demand" book publishers, with a few high tech frills thrown in.

And they gave me tips on how to be a good booth t-shirt giver-awayer, so this is my payback.

One of their first projects is the film So Much, So Fast, a story about "the remarkable events set in motion when Stephen Heywood discovers he has ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and his brother  Jamie becomes obsessed with finding a cure." It comes from Oscar-nominated directors Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, and JC is wildly passionate about the project, which has won a long list of awards. Check it out.

Dan Rather at SXSW

Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com is interviewing Dan Rather at the SXSW XXI keynote interview. I came only 20 minutes early, but am sitting in the fifth row, center, of a huge ballroom - which is, however, rapidly filling in behind and around me.

I'm one of 456784 people with a laptop, so I may not so much liveblog this as just make some notes for later. We'll see.

Jane Hamsher introduces him. Says he is a reporter who has never been intimidated by the politics of access. Willingness to ask the second question, an inspiration. She says nobody is putting hard questions to GWB and Cheney like Dan Rather did to Richard Nixon. "We need Dan Rather right now."

Rather comes out and gets a STANDING OVATION.

"Never take time to deny it, the audience will find out the truth soon enough." Abe Lincoln on overly generous introductions.

All the rest and lots more photos after the jump. UPDATE: SXSW has posted the podcast here.

SXSW booth blogging

I'm here at the SXSW booth for club kingsnake, just hanging out with film and geek folks, convincing women to take our free "My snake is bigger than your snake" t-shirts, and complaining that this morning, when I went to an overcrowded panel on online magazines and had to climb over dozens of floor-sitters and their laptops and messenger bags, I scuffed my toenail polish. I am seriously pissed off and considering suing. Hell hath no fury like a femme with a scratch on her toenail polish. And yet I look so calm.

South By

I'm in Austin at the South by Southwest conference... film, music, and "interactive" by which they mean, you know, massive geeks. I don't usually think of myself as a geek, because I don't work on the tech side, but when you're sitting there on the floor of a convention center cursing the wireless connection because you can't stay online and talking on your cell phone to a friend, just like the 456578 people lining the walls up and down the hallway, it's possible you're a geek. I'm just saying.

Let me say that the day I go to an Internet conference where the wireless really works I'll be totally happy, but it hasn't happened yet. Not at BlogHer and not at SXSW.

I saw a wild and crazy film the other night, called Suffering Man's Charity. I interviewed the filmmaker and star, Alan Cumming, who is a serious, major delight to interview. I also interviewed Karen Black, who has a small role in the film in which she shows off what may be the finest set of legs on an actress like, ever. I told her so, and then realized her son and daughter in law were sitting in the room, and I was like, OMG I must shut up now. But her daughter in law just laughed and said I made her MIL's day, so, there ya go. I was inappropriate with a movie star and it made her day. Now I will be inappropriate some day in the future  because of this positive reinforcement  and get slugged or something.

I'm seeing another film on Tuesday, a music documentary called Scott Walker 30 Century Man, and interviewing the director.  This film premiered in London and I've heard only good things about it.

Saw a great panel today on "Fictional Blogging," with Liz Henry, who I also hung out with at BlogHer. Nice to see a familiar head of purple hair face, and the panel was my favorite so far because I'm shallow.

I passed on "Sexuality and Computational Technology," because the description made my head explode.

Then I went back to my hotel room and ordered room service. I got up at what my body believed was 5 AM this morning, due to early daylight savings time and jet lag. I think I'd like to take a nap now, until oh say 8 AM tomorrow. And it's not even DARK yet.