If you enjoyed WithAPassion.com, I’m sure you’ll enjoy The Busy Signal, if you havn’t joined that program already in progress.

That being said, WithAPassion isn’t done yet, and there are other avenues I’m currently driving down as well. In terms of where I’m writing, here’s a rundown:

Features, the serious kind, will go to The Busy Signal, and will be linked to both here and at WithAPassion’s Tumblr edition.

These articles include the piece that will go up later today, “Big Windbag … ” – a lengthy focus on Andrew Breitbart, and not only why he and his cause are phony, but how his supporters and his favorite people on the right are wrong. In two weeks at the most, “Strike Three, Walking Away From the MLB,” on how I’ve decided that baseball isn’t worth the time and attention anymore, thanks to Bud Selig, and other elderly fools.

Sub-feature length pieces, and the less than serious works, will be written for WithAPassion.com, and will be linked to at the Tumblr.

These, will be your A&E reviews. Concerts, TV, etc. Upcoming for concerts: Nas & Damian Marley @ Williamsburg Waterfront, The Arcade Fire & Spoon @ MSG, Rock The Bells @ Governor’s Island, and Aziz Ansari @ Town Hall.

Small pieces, moments to be captured, etc., will be written for the Tumblr.

Seemingly, this includes things like poor product design captured at it’s failingest, and screengrabs of equal fail (i.e. Drake getting the NYTimes.com frontpage)

Brainfarts, as always, are on the Twitter. As will be as many links to the above as I can do without alienating that whole game.

Finally, there’s an idea I’ve been kicking around called “You Do Realize …” which is still in the planning stages.

Your faithful, and at times MIA, blogger,

Henry Casey

Which is to say that while I am pushing myself to improve, I’m still an esoteric weirdo. One who tries to go to bed before 11pm in order to wake up at 6AM and then make it to the gym. I’ve done it three times in the 7 days since April started. Pretty happy with the way it’s going.

And in lieu of work, here are links and descripts to/of what is getting pixels on my screens lately:

The Required Reading, which I’m late to the game on plugging, is:

The Big Takeover, Matt Taibbi’s colossus of an article about the backstage dealings with the economy, a piece that makes me want to castrate Hank Paulson on live television.

And here is an interview-slash-feature about Taibbi’s work and his own backstory.

Trent Reznor talks to DiggNation about his experience running his own version of a record label.

Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks on Mos Def vs. Christopher Hitchens from the Maher from a week from Friday. The embedded video in his post is no longer functional. Here is a link to a YouTube of it. Here is where I say I’ve decided to no longer embed videos on the blog. Embedding clips is cute, but really, I’m not making videos, not yet at least, so why should a blog of my writing and linking feature clips, which at WordPress is something that doesn’t always work right, MSNBC’s faulty video embeds come to mind.

Also:

A big piece from Glenn Greenwald on the troubling matters coming from Obama’s DOJ.

The Brüno Trailer is fucking epic.

2DopeBoyz are getting their OkayPlayer on.

Flying Lotus and Blu hooked up for a collaboration.

And now, for thoughts, without links, about the two white rappers of the moment, who really do not need links. Asher Roth is new for rap, but comedy fans might know him by his real name Dane Cook. I’ll keep making that joke until I find the leak of his upcoming record and when it doesn’t gargle ass-crack sweat. Eminem’s return song/video came out today, it’s called “We Made You,” you can find the song and video if you google it, and to be honest it’s proof that Marshall Mathers refuses to change his schtick. He still uses that busted fake mid-east accent. He still rips on female celebs who won’t fuck him. He still dresses up like male celebs who are hasbeens, his not-so-distant-future territory. He takes no risks on the song, none. Personally, I think the era of the white rapper as being important without really bringing much of anything to the table is done. Then again, we’ll see how their upcoming records sell. My esteem for a country that puts Nic Cage’s Knowing at #1 for the weekend box office is so low that I could see both of their records moving units despite a lack of any reason for that happening other than melanin deficiencies.

So you thought I didn’t post at all back in previous months? Well, things aren’t going to be frequent, but they won’t be as rare as they were in some of the sparser times over here at withapassion.com.

I will write a script in April, as a part of Script Frenzy.

I’m going to actually keep going to the gym, and this will happen twice to thrice a week.

April 6 – Baseball Season as well as Fantasy Baseball Starts.

Along with a friend, I will read Bolano’s 2666 this month.

Hunting down a coffee bean grinder that can get me uniformly coarse grinds.

Hunting down the right computer mouse for home and for work.

Two of the greatest dumb movies are to be released: Crank 2: High Voltage and Observer and Report.

But also, I will write a post to the net on a weekly basis.

Topics to include checking in with progress on the above as well as Whedon’s Dollhouse, Breaking Bad, Lost, Our Shit Economy, and I’m going to try to answer a question:

Why do video game companies hate me and the rest of the non hdtv-verse?

Yes, there are two copies and both are fucked for the same reason.

So why do print magazines need to pour their journalistic creations onto the internet?

Because there are so many flaws in the production and distribution of analog journalism that they really ought to give digital a go. This is one of my longstanding and heretofore unblogged about pet peeves: magazine subscribers take it in the ear when it comes to quality service. Sure, the subscriber saves an unbelievable % off the cover price, but if you don’t subscribe or buy, (instead reading online if said magazine offers their content for free, ala The Fader’s free PDFs) the method that former subscribers tend to lean towards, you save 100% off the cover price.

Here’s an exact quote from the customer support from The Atlantic Monthly, for some context, they release their issues around the end of the 2nd to last week of the month prior to the one named on the cover of said issue:

Please allow until March 16, 2009 for delivery of your March 2009 issue.

So that means you are forced to give them three and a half weeks after the newsstand release until that issue can be considered late. Thanks to this fact, I canceled my trial subscription with The Atlantic.

In previous ages this may not have been an issue, but now we are in the aughts, aka the On Demand decade, where time + knowledge = money in a more off balance ratio than it’s ever been.

The Atlantic puts their articles online when their issues hit the newsstand, so there’s no point in subscribing aside from the fact that the magazine’s articles look better on the printed page than they do on my screen. Is this because of some culturally placed value inherent in something that was printed on paper with ink? Probably, but I also just find it easier to read on paper. That’s how I was educated for the majority of that section of my life, so that’s how my brain is wired.

Why does it take so long for The Atlantic to get their content to me? Postage costs have risen tremendously over the years, something anyone on The Nation of McSweeney’s e-mail lists know well already, so to cut costs, magazines have to ship at lower rates, is one of the major reasons.

But the Atlantic isn’t the only publication with suffering with getting their pulpy goodness into my hands or mailbox.

The Fader magazine at the jump of this post has a two-fer when it comes to demonstrating the problems of the subscription method, which is reccomended by only a few more doctors than the withdrawl method is.

1) The USPS loves to fray the edges of your mail. you know you’ve seen this before. also, this may happen because your landlord installed a half assed mail flap or tiny ass mailboxes.

For more evidence, see the below image, or imagine the torn up netflix envelopes I take out of my tiny ass mailbox, because I don’t have my mail come to my home anymore, it all comes to me at work.

2) The databases of these publishers can get fucked right quickly resulting in wasteful doubled-up subscriptions, as seen in the pic of the Fader issues, from when I used to have a subscript (hey they gave me free tix for Bonnaroo).

So with the risks of unbelievable wait times, damaged goods, and wasteful methods in convervationalistic (well, you’re subscribing to print already, so you’re not clean at all on this) times, it’s easy to see why people don’t want to be subscribers anymore.

So with subscriber numbers dipping despite the quality inherent in the product, the publishers decided to try and publish online. Also, some mags, the New Yorker, for example, lets their staff writers blog exclusive-to-the-net content, and Hendrik Hertzberg and Sasha Frere-Jones make great use of this function of their employer’s network of info/wit distribution.

• Rick Warren

• Obama won the election and it still surprises me

• 2008 based lists

• Adam Sandler fans and Republicans vs. This Blog

• Print Media’s Tombstone & What Shall Be Inscribed On It

I’ve got off from work until the 5th of January, so don’t think I won’t have enough time to cover all of the above, and then some.

happy fictional bastards days everybody,

your not at all humble blogger,

Henry

2. It’s the video posting abilities that WordPress does not have, that’s what’s keeping me from blogging. I’m eyeing Typepad. Any other suggestions, comment/e-mail/notify me.

3. There’s probably nothing really really brilliant in it, but I’m gonna peruse the big book about blogging that Huffington just published.

4. I will be twittering, though. You can find that angle at twitter.com/withapassion.

5. People still send me shit about my anti-Sandler/Republicans post. I’ve got something of a reply and reblog and reposte coming around the corner when I get myself resituated.

Hope all is well, people.

Don Draper gets the fun advertisment work. Selling the truly epic product, convincing the public that the product is truly epic. He gets to tinker with the product, hold it in his hand, and be as vague as he wants to be.

I bring this up because these past few weeks, I ventured back into the tricky thicket known as copy writing. Copy writing for books I’ve only been told about, not even seen. For books we don’t even have layouts for yet. For books about subjects I’ve never known were topics worth ink, paper, and binding.

These are books proposed by people who do not have the time or want to write them. Those aforementioned days drove me truly insane, if I wasn’t already from this dadgum election.

It’s either a drought or a flood, and I’m sure that not a single hour goes by where I don’t think about the election. I’m really unable to be as optimistic as I sound at times. I’ve said things like “John McCain’s magician’s top hat is out of rabbits at this point, and the one’s he’s pulled, especially that one in lipstick, they’re shitting all over the act.” I’ve said things like that convincingly.

At the same time, I’d forgotten to shave.

At the same time, the polling numbers kept getting better.

I’ve described my week or two of unshaven facial hair so pitiful it looks like what was on the face of Ron Jeremy during one of his sonograms.

So due to the confluence of events, I’ve decided not to shave until the country elects a Democrat, hopefully Barack Obama.

I saw two movies this weekend. Burn After Reading was seriously worse than I needed it to be. Sure Malkovich was in top form, and it’s always fun to see Clooney play a scoundrel, but the more I think about it, the more I was disappointed by McDormand and Pitt. Religulous on the other hand was top notch quality. There was room for more evidence and facts on Maher’s side. Even if the film’s audience is going to be the choir he doesn’t need to preach to, we’d have appreciated more facts. It would have made us feel better.

Uninstalled the air conditioner today. The big Sherlock Holmes chair in the apartment is a perfect fit. The Polish community I live in now was out in full force for their day, which I’d liken to some thankfully more clothed form of the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Going to see TV On The Radio on 10/16. Havn’t seen them since the 04 Siren Fest, coincidentally, the only one I really had a whole lot of fun at.

Yours truly has a birthday coming up. Not sure of what exactly I need or want, or want to do for it. I just hope I get a late birthday present of Barack as President. In my mind I’m working on a victory playlist. If there’s no victory worth celebrating, … I might O.E. myself to the point of not being able to make it to the 25th Birthday. Yes, folks, I’m still 23 years old. I also have plans to haul ass down to Mexico and start a new life there if things go to shit.

You know what’s awesome? When a restaurant doesn’t charge your table for the bottle of wine you later find out was in the triple digits in terms of price.

Yes, I’m rambling.

That might be all I have to say at the moment.

Do something, or get chopped off the feed reader.

I liked reading your blogs. If I didn’t, I would have already deleted them, like I did Jim Chambers’.

Blurred blogs are personal ones that don’t need to be more public.