What are you implying, John? That O’Reilly & Geraldo are narcissists enthralled with their own overblown egos, projecting their own petty insecurities onto the world around them? inventing false enemies for the sole purpose of bolstering their sense of self-importance, itty bitty Nixons minus the relevance or a hint of vision? How dare you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyhzw2kcSSs

Miscellaneous things I have marked for reading later:

• How to think like Warren Buffett, the 29-part series. How relevant investing advice from 1978 is I don’t know, but they’re all fairly short with good quotes from the shareholder letters of Berkshire Hathaway. (via Lifehacker)
• Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts. I got a MacBook recently and keep accidentally deleting things with my ingrained Windows shortcuts. (again, via Lifehacker)
• Managing around interruptions. While I’m fairly organized on the papers side, I get interrupted a lot, especially when I’m trying to, say, write a 2100-word article due next week or a marketing plan. I started coming into work an hour before everyone else, just for an hour of quiet time. 
• Sirena Huang on TEDTalks. I find the TEDTalks blog a little frustrating in that I can’t always download the mp3s and I’ve not yet figured out why.
• Into the Mountains of Kyrgyzstan. I’ve fallen way behind on the Frugal Traveller column on the NYTimes. Between the column, a friend who gets to travel a great deal for work, and some recent reading, it’s just making me want to get my passport, quit my job, and go.

As one the books in Penguin’s (very pretty) Great Ideas series, Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived, and What I Lived For was a refreshing philosophical treat at a time when I was contemplating how I am choosing to go about my life. The book contains three essays that are a part of Thoreau’s Walden, an exploration of “his solitary and self-sufficient home in the New England woods”. While I liked being able to read the book while waiting for the bus or on the Metro, the three essays contained in the book are also widely available online:

1. Economy
2. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
3. Winter Animals

Some pertinent quotes:

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Rob Walker wrote a follow-up post after receiving feedback on the recent Brand Underground article. I didn’t think he was either too adulatory or too critcial. He does, however, have the opportunity to go a lot farther with this topic than 3 20-something skaters/cool guys making t-shirts and schlepping them out to retailers nationwide. Every subculture and cunterculture and counter-subculture has its icons and its cool guys and all of them have attempted monetization/commercialization/productization to varying degrees of success. I suppose depth was a better choice for the piece than breadth, but I’m pretty sure there’s enough room in a book for a few more examples than streetwear.

In almost 7 years of living in Seattle, I met the mayor (Greg Nickels) once, by accident. It was an almost forgettable encounter, except that the whole thing was so weird and awkward since I didn’t recognize who he was. I’ve met Rudy Giuliani too, which was entirely memorable as he managed to look me in the eye while shaking my hand and saying my name with no obvious glance to my nametag. Very impressive party trick.

I can now confidently say that I’ve met the next mayor of Washington, DC. I can say that because I have met all of the mayoral candidates for Washington, DC. Some of them twice. The conversation goes like this:

Me: late for the Metro, trying to avoid eye contact with the newspaper pushers and strange crowd of over-dressed people with flyers in their hands, not getting to the escalator without talking to…

Mayoral Candidate: “Hi. Good morning. How are you? (shakes my hand) I’m Michael Brown/Linda Cropp/Adrian Fenty/Marie Johns/Vincent Orange and I’m running for mayor. Do you have a minute?”

Me: “Not a DC voter.”

Mayoral Candidate: turns to the person behind me. “Hi. Good morning. How are you? (shakes their hand) I’m Michael Brown/Linda Cropp/Adrian Fenty/Marie Johns/Vincent Orange and I’m running for mayor. Do you have a minute?”

• How to Create a Meme
• Nicholas Negroponte on the One Laptop Per Child Project. Nigeria recently committed to buying 1 million of the laptops, while India rejected the project.
• Seattle is becoming the home to gourmet/indie sodas.

In an excellent NY Times Magazine article called “The Brand Underground”, columnist Rob Walker expounds on the nature of the indie brand, the identity of those who’ve taken to heart the phrase “Commodify Your Dissent” (though his take on it is “commodify your indifference”):

Corporate branding is a function of the profit motive: companies have stuff to sell and hire experts to create the most compelling set of meanings to achieve that goal. A keen awareness of and cynicism toward this core fact of commercial persuasion — and the absurd lengths that corporations will go to in the effort to infuse their goods with, say, rebelliousness or youthful cool — is precisely the thing that is supposed to define the modern consumer. We all know that corporate branding is fundamentally a hustle. And guys like A-Ron are supposed to know that better than anybody.

Which is why the supposed counterculture nature of his brand might arouse some suspicion. Manufactured commodities are an artistic medium? Branding is a form of personal expression? Indie businesses are a means of dropping out? Turning your lifestyle into a business is rebellious?

It’s not just those involved in skater or street culture, who are the primary targets for the article. Bloggers, podcasters, MySpace people are also trying to figure out how to turn themselves and their lifestyle into a product that generates revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Update: As a counterpoint, Scott Puckett’s article “How Much Did You Pay for Your Identity: The Big Business of Selling Identity to Kids”.