On Walkabout.

Hey all. I know it’s been quiet ’round these parts — sorry about that. It’s been a tough year so far. Berk has had to deal with a nasty dog bite back in February and, now, what looks to be cancer. (He’s getting his toe amputated tomorrow — Hopefully, that’ll contain the bug.) Also in February, I had an 18-month romance implode rather disastrously. I thought we’d be going the distance…but, before disappearing, the ex made sure to convey she never actually took the relationship seriously in the first place. Er…good to know. (Yes, I know this sort of thing has happened to me before. What can I say? Either I’m too sensitive, or else I’m getting soft.)

Anyway, the upshot is there’s not much joy in Mudville these days, and I’m just not feeling very inclined to post here. I can’t really talk about politics because (1) it interferes with my current employ and (2) when you get right down to it, I find it hard to take presidential politics seriously as a vehicle for (hope-and-)change these days (although I’m sure it’s a great way to get your name on a NASCAR car.) I can’t really talk about personal matters because that’s just plain unsightly, and the Internet really doesn’t need any more TMI kvetching about first world problems. Nor, quite frankly, does it need to know what I thought of 21 Jump Street and Mass Effect 3 and the new Prometheus viral campaign and the like.

I’m not saying the Ghost is dead and buried, but I don’t see it coming back online regularly anytime soon: With the exception of the occasional comment-spam clear, the old hound and I are on walkabout for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the archives are here and here, and all the old movie reviews are here. If you’ve been swinging by the site at any time for the past 12+ years, apologies for the service outage and thanks, as always, for stopping by.

Update: Thanks for all the well-wishes in the comments. As a follow-up, Berk has lost the toe, but the offending infection has, per the lab report, been “completely excised.” Meanwhile, after several weeks in the cone, the old hound is back to moving around normally and otherwise seems in good health. Squirrels and skateboarders, beware.

Dozing at the Dozen.

As of today, Ghost in the Machine is 12 years old. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. 11] Like its venerable ombudsdog, this site is mostly characterized these days by short bursts of frenetic activity followed by long periods of slumber. But, in its own way, the ghost is still keep-on-keepin’-on. If you’ve been here for awhile or just got lost on Google today, thanks, as always, for stopping by.

Silence of the Hares.

Apologies for the recent quiet ’round these parts — work has been kicking mighty hard of late. I feel bad about not keeping up-to-date here on recent events in the Middle East and Middle West. I feel bad about being several reviews behind on the movie front. But, more than anything, I just feel bad about letting down the bunnies.

Sigh…anyway, I hope to rectify in the days and weeks ahead. (Besides, after the under-reported fiasco that happened here last week, I may well find myself with more time than usual on my hands come March.) In any case, thanks, as always for coming by. (Disapproving rabbit via Cute Overload and, um, Disapproving Rabbits.)

Microphone Check, Micro-Microphone Checka…

Another long stretch of quiet ’round these parts, I know, and in terms of post count, this September has been the quietest month in nearly 11 years of blogging. (Hopefully the handful of remaining regular readers are checking the Twitter feed.) But, busy workdays notwithstanding, the Ghost lives! So if you’re still swinging by these parts, pardon the interruption, and thanks, as always, for dropping by.

Whither the Ghost?

Hey everyone — sorry about the lack of updates ’round here the past fortnight. Between work, not seeing any movies since Inception (Salt has been right on the cusp — I’ll get to it eventually), and not wanting to comment too much on recent politics to maintain some degree of discretionary work-life divide, I’ve been neglecting the long-form format here at GitM. But, if you’re not following already, I am still maintaining a steady Twitter presence, and I expect posts will pick up here too as we move deeper into the recess period. That’s the plan, anyway!

Retreat to Advance.

Sorry about the radio silence over the past week. I’ve been ensconced away at the yearly office retreat, which coupled with family in town and a very busy work week regardless, cut deeply into the GitM time. There’s been quite a lot of big doings over the past week, and I’m four movie reviews behind at the moment, but hopefully I’ll catch up over the next several days.

Farewell, Bradlands.

Via @anildash, some sad news today: Brad Graham, one of the blogger old-school and an all-around friendly, funny guy, has apparently passed away. (1968-2010.)

I never met Brad in person, but we traded comments now and again and his sites — first, The BradLands and later Must See HTTP — could always be counted on for great pop culture commentary and sundry other quality links. Plus, he was always a very friendly and welcoming presence back in the early days, and he really helped everybody feel like they were part of a burgeoning online community. Farewell, Brad. You will be missed.

Update: The online wake is here.

The First Ten Years.

Way back in the last millennium, when I started GitM, things were different. America had never had a black president. We had no clue that there was water on the moon. Everybody agreed, and knew in their bones, that torture was immoral. The Knicks were actually considered a pretty good basketball team. Weblogs were still counted in the thousands.

And, after two-to-three years of building out a website on Geocities, mostly consisting of rinky-dink book reviews, I decided one day to embark on an experiment. I had tried several times over my first twenty-five years to keep a journal, and had given up each time. The product mostly came out as navel-gazing, self-indulgent whining, and, frankly, it bored me to write it. But, I realized after discovering sites like Megnut, Saturn, and Barbelith one day, what if I wrote that journal on the Internet? A public forum would help rein in the Gaelic melancholy, it would focus my thinking on the issues I cared about, and it would structure the many hours I spent dinking around online already…

Ten years ago today, Ghost in the Machine was born. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.] (FWIW, I chose the name for a lot of reasons, none of them really having to do with Arthur Koestler or the Police — It was a callback to one of my triumvirate of favorite movies (along with Amadeus and Miller’s Crossing): Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. (“Ere I am, J.H…“) It was already the name of my coxing column for Rowersworld, because it describes almost perfectly what a good coxswain is. And, given that I was working as a DC ghostwriter at the time, it seemed appropriate in that way too.)

At any rate, the very first post included a movie review (Being John Malkovich — I liked it!) and some primary 2000 coverage (as old-school visitors may remember, I was very, very pro-Bradley and anti-Gore that year), and those are the twin axes GitM has mostly revolved around ever since. (You could argue the spinoff content ’round here has done better, tho’ — The Leaky Cauldron ended up becoming one of the premiere Harry Potter sites on the web (no thanks to me), and, on any given day, the part of this site that gets by far the most hits are my American History orals summaries, mostly undergrads looking for Cliff Notes, I presume.)

And so, ten years passed. There was 2000 and 2004 and 2008. There was 9/11 and Afghanistan and Iraq. There was orals and the interminable, continuing dissertation. There was Spin This and Bush Must Go and HTRSC and Trainwreck (and soon, Toxic Talk.) There was Casino Jack and Boss DeLay. There was Geocities and Movable Type. There was DC and New York and then DC again. There was New Zealand and Hawaii (often). There was Vegas and the West Coast, the DR and Denver. There was Elaine and Jen and Amanda. As of May 2000, there was and is my trusty sheltie sidekick, l’il Berkeley. There was a lot of thinking about progressivism. And there were movies…lots and lots of movies. If they keep making ’em, I’ll keep watching ’em.

Now, a decade later, I am back where I began — in DC, working as a speechwriter. And that’s fine…more than fine, actually. At least for now, I feel like this is where I belong. As for the blog, well, after ten years of doing this, I don’t ever expect GitM to be well-read anymore — the stats peaked six or seven years ago, and, quite frankly and by all indications, this now seems like a reasonably dead corner of the web. Nonetheless, I expect GitM will continue.

So, here’s to the first ten years, and fate-willing, here’s to many more. And if you’ve been coming by here for a day, a month, a year, or a decade, thanks, as always, for dropping by. It is much appreciated.

This Used to Be My Playground.

“Back in the proverbial day, GeoCities was the place where many a modern-day internet nerd cut his or her teeth. After a spectacular dot com purchase of $3.65 billion and an equally spectacular dot com bust, its closure marks the end of one of the earliest ages of the social web.“

We’re still a few weeks shy of the tenth anniversary ’round these parts. Nonetheless, GitM’s original home is, as of this morning, defunct: Yahoo has followed through on their April announcement and is closing Geocities today. So long, old bird — the neighborhood(s) just won’t be the same without ya.

The District, Take Two.

A very happy 233rd Independence Day. So, some big news on the life front: It took quite a bit longer than I originally anticipated, but I’ve finally managed to buck the worrying trend out there and secure full-time remunerative employ. As such, tomorrow I drive back up to Washington DC — my home from 1997-2001 — to start work on Monday. (Berk will follow in a week or two, once I successfully navigate the apartment-hunting phase of the move and find a decent place that doesn’t discriminate against sheltie-americans.)

My job, in case y’all were wondering: I’m going back into full-time political speechwriting. More specifically, I will be working on the Hill, House side, as a “foot-soldier in the Obama revolution,” to borrow a frequent McCainism. And I hope and expect I’ll be getting a first-hand look at how the legislative sausage is made from the ground floor.

If you’re curious to know who exactly I’m working for, feel free to drop me an e-mail sometime. Why so coy about it? Don’t worry — it’s a Democrat! Still, after close to ten years of posting here at GitM, this feels like a good time to establish some modicum of healthy distance between my life and blog. If anybody’s still reading from my last DC tenure way back when, I acknowledged openly back then that I worked at the FCC, and it’s not like this became the go-to place for inside scuttlebutt on the AOL-TW merger or anything. (Nor, during my Carville stint, did I post about any work goings-on in this space either. I may not have been blogging per se in ’97 and ’98, but I was nevertheless writing here pretty often.)

But, in those days, the Internet was more of a Wild West frontier town, blogging was a relatively new fad — back then, it wasn’t “What do the bloggers think?!” but “Why are you bothering to post that stuff online?!” — and I think it was easier to get away with more. Now, I’m under no illusions that GitM has or ever will enjoy a large readership — In fact, in terms of visitors this site peaked probably five or six years ago. And, from the beginning, I’ve always been conscious that this is a public forum, and have tried to be relatively temperate in my posts accordingly. I think the archives here reflect pretty well on me, all in all, and I’m not really concerned about hiding anything. Even if somebody did make the effort for some ridiculous, unlikely reason, the worst headline a right-wing blogger type might come up with after perusing the past decade of posts is “Democratic Aide is Overgrown Boy, Won’t Shut Up about Lord of the Rings.“

But, obviously, I have been a partisan here over the years. And so, by establishing a little more distance between my blogging and working life, I hope it’ll emphasize the fact that both the ten years of posts already here, and the posts to come, reflect on me and me alone. As far as GitM goes in the future, I won’t be posting on my day-to-day business as always, and, as always, I’ll be erring far on the side of discretion in my choice of topics. Still, unless Congress suddenly takes a decisive stance on movie trailers, fanboy-to-film properties, random science and culture articles, and the occasional items of historical or progressive interest, I’m sure the usual content here won’t shift all that much.

Phew! Now that all the caveats are out of the way, let me say that I’m very happy to be both rejoining the ranks of the employed and returning to political speechwriting. (Yes, some aspects of DC life do rankle, but I have a lot of friends there, and it’s definitely a fun, interesting town.) To be honest, this is a career move I’ve been considering since I first set off for grad school in 2001, so my returning to the political fold on the other end of the PhD process (give or take a few months) feels like a natural and very satisfying progression to me. (The Ivory Tower isn’t losing much anyway, particularly given that the existence of academic jobs in this recession economy, as many poor souls out there can tell you, is proving to be almost entirely theoretical. Besides, over the long term, I don’t really see the academic and speechwriting paths as mutually exclusive anyway. And never say never — with any luck, I have a ways to go yet before the final bell tolls.)

At any rate, I’m off for a hopefully MacArthuresque return to DC. I expect updates here will be more sparse than usual over the next few weeks as I make the move and settle in. But, I’ll be back, in due course. Until then, a very happy July 4th to you and yours.