BuzzMachine

Everywhere art

: Am I the last one to see Sent, an online gallery of art from phone cams? If you want to submit, send pix to submit@sentonline.com. Invited artists include “Weird Al” Yankovic, Mark Cuban, and Will Wheaton.

Blogging in underwear

: Nerve started a photo blog.

Just what we need: more yelling

: I’m watching a one-night-later rerun of Bill Maher’s show and the decibel level is rising to the shrill heights of tabloid TV and CNN before it got dull. Yeah, this is helpful, this is smart. Michael Moore and Canadian loser Kim Campbell team up with Maher to beat up Republican Rep. David Drier over the seven minutes — you know, those seven minutes. They scream for more than seven minutes about the seven minutes. Get a platform, people.

More stupidity. Maher pontificates: “Political conventions are important and they deserve to be broadcast and watched in their entirety.” That’s naive nostalgia and we don’t need Bill Maher to tell us what we should watch.

The only moment to enjoy: Ralph Nader appears and both Maher and Moore get on their knees to beg him to drop out.

Hemlines and weblogs

: The NY Times relegates weblogs to featureville with a Sunday Fashion & Style story about the convention bloggers. Doesn’t say much. Or rather, it says too much after a week in which too damned much was said about blogs.

Take that

: David Weinberger responds to CNET’s Charles Cooper in a vlog: “Read my pixels: I am not a journalist.” Watch it. He explains blogs to journalists, which is to say that bloggers aren’t journalists. He also predicts that bloggers won’t be credentialed at the next convention because the people there will be blogging.

More foto funnies

: The salute, separated at birth.

Sex sells!

: Steve Hall’s wonderful Adrants is supposed to be about advertising. But, like advertising itself, it’s really about sex: National Orgasm Week, hot-chick hitchhikers in wet t-shirts, Victoria Secret’s college hottie-wear, TV cameraman hires hooker in TV van, Molson’s pick-up-chick advice, hot marketing director poses in Playboy to get free ink, Christina Aquilera makes shoes hot. Excuse me while I go take a cold shower.

Boston: The Vietnam Re-education Camp

: As a (graying, middle-aged) child of the ’60s, I’m amazed that Vietnam became a key campaign bragging point in Kerry’s acceptance speech.

Vietnam had become such a dirty word to both sides. To the antiwar side, it represented a wrong; to the prowar side, it represented failure; to both, it came to mean shame. And today, in Iraq, Vietnam came to mean quagmire to the antiwar side. The word was as loaded as a bomber headed for Hanoi Harbor.

Yet here was John Kerry — ten-hut! reporting for duty! — masterfully playing every side to his favor: He fought in Vietnam, so he can run an army. He fought against Vietnam, so he can keep us out of a quagmire.

Vietnam, the word, had been rehabilitated before our eyes. There was not a moment’s hesitation, not a decibel’s hush surrounding the word in Boston. Vietnam suddenly became a happy word, something to brag about: Mom, apple pie, and Tet.

I never thought I’d live to see this day. Vietnam, the word, truly divided this nation — nothing like red-state-blue-state hype we endure from talk-show twits these days. Vietnam brought war to the streets around that Democratic convention. Vietnam divided families (almost mine). Vietnam ousted a President.

Clearly, Kerry is counting on Vietnam ousting another President. He hopes the doves (’60s word) will see him as the guy to avoid fighting another Vietnam. He hopes the hawks will see him as the guy to avoid losing another Vietnam.

And so, he surrounds himself with vets and pictures of war and pictures of protest and he salutes and we are all re-educated like ARVN officers let out of camp in Hanoi. Vietnam is now a happy word, an honorable word, a word that means success by avoiding failure. Vietnam is frigging nostalgia. Vietnam is a word meant to unite, not divide.

Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh.