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Ladies and gentlemen, for your weekend viewing pleasure, a stirring story of an intransigent coyote and the woman who photographed him. Voted Best Picture by the South Torrance Film Critics Circle, it's a nature documentary, it's an art film, it's...

Coyote In the Road.

(You'll need Windows Media Player to see it. Shot on location in December 2004 at Joshua Tree National Park)

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Need proof that the mainstream media has a different perspective on things? Check Romanesko, which is pretty much the place for the practitioners of the news trade in America to gather and gossip and mostly deny they're liberal. What was the big news media story today?

No, you're wrong. Jim put a single story plus a link to the report about that on the site, buried low on the list.

How about a conservative columnist NOBODY READS with a TV show that NOBODY WATCHES doing something ludicrously unethical?

Yep. TWO separate entries, here and here, with no less than six additional story links.

You mean that there was nothing else on "Rathergate" to which it would be worth linking? Nothing?

Well, maybe that's unfair- surely the letters page, which is usually a lively debate among members of the profession, has all the buzz about the report- was it fair? Should the four fired employees have been fired? Should Rather have taken the fall? How could what they did NOT be politically motivated?

Um, nope- NOT A SINGLE LETTER as of now (11:12 pm ET Monday). Not a SINGLE LETTER on the only media story right now that's big enough to have crossed over to the news the public sees. It's one of the lead stories on even the local news shows right now, and the people in the news media aren't discussing it? They're more concerned about Armstrong Freaking Williams, a guy nobody in the general public knows, than Dan Rather, a household word?

Maybe they're too busy covering the important news. Who knows, they may get Brad to say something about Jennifer.

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It's the morning after and Romanesko's finally added some stories and links about Rathergate. How, er, timely. But the letters haven't changed- I guess nobody's talking about it. (Better guess- everyone's trying to figure out the best spin)

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They replaced the motherboard on my computer, and all was well until the updated ATI video driver went in, at which point I got the Blue Screen of Death and lost everything. I mean, all data, all documents, all programs. Couldn't reinstall Windows, couldn't get past the BIOS bootup, couldn't access the hard drive booting from the CD, couldn't get to Safe Mode or a command prompt or the recovery utility. Couldn;t do anything but run the wipe-everything-clean-and-start-over utility. THAT worked, of course.

Luckily, I'd backed up the documents and the financial stuff, so I wasn't completely out of luck when I had to revert the system to its fresh-from-the-factory state, but I'm still not done reinstalling, and my mail and bookmarks are a mess. If you sent me anything in the past week, I'd appreciate it if you'd resend it- I lost all of that.

What have we learned?

1. Back up everything.

2. Windows sucks.

3. Dell customer service sucks, too. And I've spent hours on the line with them in the last couple of days, so I know of which I speak.

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I was in the midst of yelling at some customer service rep in India about my computer, which had crashed and wouldn't recover and lost all my data, when, restraining myself from cursing, growled "this is a disaster, man, a disaster."

No, no it wasn't.

And I apologized.

India knows what a disaster is. The entire region of South Asia knows. Hell, Ventura County, where they're still sifting the mud for bodies, knows. Some well-off suburban guy grumbling about his precious new computer, well, there's no disaster here.

Losing perspective is easy. I mean, my great tragedy was to lose a few ultimately inessential files, some unrecoverable e-mail and work, and a few software programs that I downloaded and bought and registered but which are not available without a paid upgrade anymore. And I'd backed up all of my documents and my financial records. That's it. So I had to reinstall a zillion programs and hastily reconstruct some pieces I'd written. Disaster? Not even on a personal scale- 2004, now THERE was a disaster. This? Piece of cake.

So far this year, I've had one computer crash, one aggravation over the wrong video card, a couple of teeth needing repair, and some minor car repairs, all in less than two weeks. And you know what? It's still better than last year. Picked up a couple of new projects already, getting good feedback from my latest stuff, the rain finally stopped and it was gorgeous today... I might even smile a little.

And with the end of the rain and cloud cover and lousy atmospherics came the first reception of over-the-air HDTV and digital TV on my PC's HD card. (We can't get L.A. OTA TV here- blocked by a mountain- so we can only get San Diego from 100 miles away, when conditions are just right) And who's the first person I see? An almost-first-lady.

But I'm STILL gonna keep a positive outlook.

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I don't know how I did it.

Commuting, that is. I had to leave the house today- you know how I hate that- and that meant a long drive up the 405 and La Cienega to West Hollywood and Beverly Hills for a meeting. I haven't had to make that drive for a while, and definitely not in the thick of rush hour. I think it was sitting on the off ramp that merges into La Cienega from the 405- nothing but red lights and tail lights ahead- that reminded me how much I don't miss driving to work, how grateful I am to work at home. I've picked up another project that'll require some driving, and I guess I'll have to get used to the drive again. I'll try.

I've had some epic commutes before- 90 miles each way from North Jersey to the shore, 35 miles across the state, the legendary 45 miles at 3:30 am to Pasadena- and I developed tricks to make me feel like it wasn't all bad. Whether it was trying to hit the Essex tolls on the Parkway South by 7:30 am because that would mean I'd beat traffic the rest of the way, or knowing which lane to be in at every point on the 110 North- left lane from the 91 to the 105, then all the way to the right up to downtown- it gave me the impression that I'd beat the crowd, when, in reality, the crowd beat me, every time. And then, I discovered the joys of commuting from the bedroom to the office down the hall.

I guess everyone finds a way to ease their commute- radio, coffee, whatever. And while you're doing it, you convince yourself that it's not so bad. I like driving- like it a lot, actually, when the roads are wide open and the speed limit's high. But this jammed-all-the-way 40 mile ultramarathon... no, sir, I don't like it. GOod thing tomorrow's a stay-in-the-house day.

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Do we really have to do this?

I guess because I sometimes talk politics, and because in the post-Armstrong Williams (full name "Who the Hell Ever Heard of Armstrong Williams?") era a pair of the more prominent liberal bloggers have been revealed to be paid "consultants" to political campaigns, here's my disclosure statement:

Nobody pays me to write any of this crap.

Nobody would ever even think to pay me to write this crap.

I pay someone else- the server company- to let me post this crap.

If someone for any unfathomable reason wanted to pay me to take a particular viewpoint, I wouldn't take it.

If anyone cares, I get paid to write for AllAccess.com and to do projects for Sirius Satellite Radio and consulting for Sabo Media. I don't write a whole lot about them anyway. You don't care. The end.

Now, whaddya think about the Eagles-Vikings game Sunday?

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Suddenly, those names are back. I refer here, of course, to those randomly generated names for the "To:" field in spam e-mail, the ones that resemble no real names on Earth. Herewith, the latest entrants in the Spam Hall of Fame, populated entirely by the "senders" of e-mail I've received:

Milestone A. Indiscretions, Hebrews M. Wangled, Antislavery A. Shandy, Blockaded I. Anion, Scatter P. Morons, and Replicas O. Saar.

If you have a baby on the way, you might want to borrow these. Imagine the joy of growing up with a name like Hebrews M. Wangled.

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