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I caught wind of Lonelygirl15 just a day or two before her story broke. What appeared to be a teen’s self-produced video blog is instead a joke, a hoax, a movie teaser, a conspiracy, and/or an occult recruitment ploy.

Some people are mad, but many “fans” of the “show” say they don’t care if it’s real or not. They are entertained.

Doc-u-drama’s were also big this week. ABC’s miniseries, The Path to 9/11, drew critics and calls for censorship. The argument? Stuff wasn’t true. The defense? It’s a dramatization. The worry? Folks would take as historical fact dramatic embellishments and compressions. To make the show more exciting characters (with the names of the real people) are composites of many people and their actions. And some events are embellished or happen out of sequence. Stuff that made some people look worse than they were. Some stuff that might have made other people–characters??–look better than they were.

It’s a show. So lots of people say it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. It’s entertainment.

What about the biggest entertainment here in D.C.? Politics. The past weeks have had very dramatic revelations by President Bush. About what we have learned from “high-value” detainees. About why we are at war with Iraq. And the continuing on-again, off-again linking of al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein.

Does the truth matter? Or is it all just a show where either truth or fiction are legitimate jumping-off points for the next episode.

ALERT: I am really not making this up. This was actually published in U.S. News and World Report, written by Paul Bedard and posted August 20, 2006.

Animal House in the West Wing

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we’re learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he’s still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

Now, I am far from above a good poopie joke. And a well placed fart is always good for a laugh. And I don’t hold it against the President that he has a sense of humor similar to mine–that of a nine-year old boy. But you think that he would feel that he could control it in front of women, or even heads of state during a G-8 meeting.

I wonder, though, if Condi can burp the A, B, C’s.

The printing press begot newspapers, posters and novels.

The World Wide Web begot blogs, photos and video to a broad audience.

The printing press, after a few hundred years, brought information to the masses. It took the Web just a few short years to proliferate into ga-zillions of pages and millions of viewers.

Today, I am thinking about the results of the latter proliferation. If everyone can contribute, and contribution is almost free (I recognize that there are costs for cameras, computers, and connectivity, but this is a relatively low barrier. Do you know how much it costs to print and distribute a book!??!), is there any value? Is there value when something is cheap and easily available? Would this entry have more value in China, where it would be harder to get to? Are we all diminishing the value of the web by posting every piece of junk we can think of?

And in this democratization of information, is there a risk that with so much information, so many voices, such a proliferation of choices we will turn to a few standard sources?

Well, not if you’re from high-school to post-grad. Ask Tom.

Back from vay-cay. Did you know that you can leave Washington, D.C. behind? Really, you can. The blackberry doesn’t function well on the island. Really there is only one spot in the house that I can get even a single bar. And not consistently, either.

It did work wonderfully at the beach. But then who cares? Do you think the IT guys will notice the sand and the rust? Naaah!

And then we didn’t even have TV. I guess there was some issue regarding something in London, but we didn’t have CNN. Or MSNBC. Or even Katie Couric.

I did spend time with the local weekly. Learned about crazy real estate prices and the upcoming visit by a candidate for governor. Turns out the island doesn’t usually get statewide candidates. The candidate–they said he was the frontrunner–was going to appear at a place called, “The Chicken Box.” Oh, and all about High Tide.

Back in D.C. Having a tough time with the reality-check thing, though. Everyone always says D.C. isn’t the “real world.” I’m not so sure about that statement, though.

That would be me. The Boy Scout is off camping for a week, and here I am. Moping around. Looking for him. He wasn’t in his bed this morning. Or yesterday morning, for that matter.

He wasn’t at the PlayStation for a ga-zillion hours today. His juice glass and cereal bowl were not left dirty in the sink. No DSU’s on the floor in the bathroom. No play by play about today’s episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. I don’t know what happened on today’s show!?! He didn’t ask me about my day. He does that, you know.

The dog misses him, too. He paces a bit when the rest of us come home without the Boy Scout. He checks in his room, too. He looks at me and asks with his eyes, “Where the hell did you put him?”

So I bought a crock pot.

…between one and inane.

I got to spend 30 minutes today trying to get a password to a new application. Yes, 30 minutes until I requested the help of Jesus, Mary, and all the saints. In vain.

After doing all types of tricks to try and get an acceptable password and FAILING, I finally went to the manual in order to try and avoid another “The password validation failed due to the following reason(s):” message. (And, yes, it was in that cloying green color!) Below is from the manual:

“Here is a list of all the different rules that result in an acceptable password:

• Passwords shall contain no more than three identical consecutive characters in any position from the previous password.
• Passwords shall not be identical to any of the previous 6 passwords
• Password must contain at least 8 characters and 14 at the most. * (Why no more than 14??)
• Password must contain at least two digits. *
• Password must contain at least two upper case characters. *
• Password must contain at least two lower characters. *
• Password must not start with a number. *
• Password must not end with a number. *
• Password must not contain tabs, spaces.
• Passwords must contain a special character, with the exception of: commas (,), backslashes (/), double quotes (“), single quotes (‘), ampersands (&), curly braces ({}), or pipes (). *
• Passwords shall not contain any proper noun or the name of any person, pet, child, or fictional character. * (I did NOT make this one up!!!)
  
• Passwords shall not contain any employee serial number, Social Security number, birth date, phone number, or any information that could be readily guessed about the creator of the password. *
• Passwords shall not contain any simple pattern of letters or numbers, such as “qwerty”, or “xyz123”.” *

* indicates rules that I broke on different attempts to create a password before finding the goofy manual. Also, wrong things not among the rules but still offering the dreaded error message: no using the same letter two times in a row. So there may be additional hidden rules as yet uncovered.

Passwords are important security mechanisms. But not if they are so impossible to remember–because of STUPID rules–that you can’t remember them. So instead you see people with stickies under their desks, beneath their keyboards, or even right on the monitor because THEY CAN”T REMEMBER THEIR PASSWORDS.

That, at least to me, doesn’t seem very secure. [DKSAdkf12d& also not acceptable. I am still trying!]

Man, it’s tough to be under a microscope. Especially if you are like 7-feet tall. Like one of the soccer coaches of our past.

The 14-year-old has since give soccer away for the gridiron, but in his “younger days,” he was pretty good on the soccer pitch. He played some travel soccer-but he didn’t love it like it needed for all that effort. And he wasn’t having fun. So he moved back to the rec league, where he was placed on an established team with a great big guy running around the field with the kids who was the Coach. Coach Andy intimidated me by his stature and deep rolling voice–oh, and the police car he drove.

Turns out that he is a very funny guy who cared about all the kids on the team and made sure that my kid was welcomed, even if he was the only one from a different school. It was fun for my son to play, because that is what they did, played. And when he fell hit the grass and rolled around in pain, and I would yell, “Get up, you aren’t getting a penalty, stop acting like a European soccer prima donna,” Coach Andy would turn around and note–with a grin–that I was being a bit tough.

Coach Andy is really a good guy. It is really crummy that his remarks at a recent community meeting on the awful murder in Georgetown is what is putting him in the news. The thing is he shouldn’t have voiced what folks–black and white–readily admit is true. He can’t say it because he is The Man. And I feel bad for him, because if you knew him, you would love him, too.

We are on the cusp of the “season of birthdays.” There are eight family birthday’s between the end of July and Labor Day. This causes my problem. As an author.

I write about the children portion of my family members as the 14-year-old and the 11-year-old. But they will soon be the fifteen-year-old and the twelve-year-old. My problem? What happens when the (now) 11-year-old becomes 14? Will he then be the 14-year-old? But what about the 14-year old from three years ago (work with me on this time travel thing)?

I know what you are thinking, “STOP DOING THIS BLOG before then.”

Did you see the movie Pleasantville? The idea is that these two kids from the late 1990’s get transported into a black and white 50’s sitcom where nothing bad ever happens. Color blooms as the fictional family experience a range of emotions–changing their silver skin tones into pinks, peaches, and reds.

Listening to Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) get all weepy and worried about the sanctity of marriage–and even the security of our nation–without a constitutional ban on gay marriage is right out of the fictional sitcom. It harkens to a time of make believe when our country was strong because marriages were strong. Pleasantville.

Did you know, though, that Tennessese has one of the highest divorce rates in the country? Yup, the fourth highest rate of divorce. Behind Nevada, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. (Did you get that last one Mr. Inhofe R-OK?)

And do you know which state has the lowest rate of divorce? That would be Massachusetts.

I think that Mr. Frist is losing his color.