Dave Maass

So, a few people threw out some suggestions for my new banner headline. I liked none of ‘em:

maassive.com: taking it in the arse since i met shanny
No. I started using the word “arse” well before I met shanny.

maassive.com: not JUST the cream of manchester.
No. Cuz I still don’t get why shanny calls me that.

maassive.com: just dave!
No. Cuz I’m holding out hope that one day someone might ask to be a guest blogger.

maassive.com: man candy never tasted so sweet
No. That opens me up to false advertising litigation.

maassive.com: act now and we’ll throw in an oven mitt for free!
No. I don’t even have an oven mitt myself. I bundle up the dish towel. I don’t have bandaids either, so when I burn myself, I use paper towels and scotch tape. I tried to use a paper towel as an oven mitt once. It looked like one of those fireballs Mario used to throw after he jumped on a flower.

maassive.com: my friends are bored without me
that’s so sweet! don’t you think this maassive.com’s too self-important as it is?

Maassive.com: Double voweling it like you wish you could.
No. I think it’s the same general idea as my first idea, but without the flow. The original works in 5-7-5:

Maassive.com*
Challenging Redundancy
Since 2005.

Maassive.com: High self-esteem has no price tag.
No. It’s too similar to “Money can’t buy you love,” and “You can’t buy happiness,” the logic of both of which I often question. I also don’t like the term self-esteem, it reminds me too much of D.A.R.E.. And anyway, isn’t bragging about high self-esteem a clear sign of low self-esteem.

Maassive.com: Eating raw fish in the desert without fear.
No. My accountant doesn’t want me to be reminded about sushi every time I open my blog.

So far, I’m liking “Challenging redundancy,” but I’ve still got a couple weeks to brainstorm. “Biting off more than I can chew,” came from a story I wrote about my open bite. It’s a riff on being unable to close my front teeth and being often more ambitious than practical. Maybe I’m getting wise and pragmatic in my years. Maybe I’m just bored of that tagline.

Challenging redundancy … Well, that’s interesting on a philosophical level to me. But also, it’s wordplay, since the word “Maassive” itself challenges redundancy.

For efficiency’s sake, the double-A is unnecessary. But for aesthetic sake, the extra “a” adds layers of visual and phonetic meaning. The Double-A makes massive more massive. That’s probably unnecessarily academic. Maybe I should go with something like:

Maassive.com: Oh, it’s on. It’s so on.

* Maassive.com is five syllables: Ma-a-ssive-dot-com

So, Jim Terr put my story from Liar’s Night up on YouTube. A warning, it’s got a lot of sex in it, so it’s absolutely, positively NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

This story may be a lie or the truth. I’m not telling. If you really wanted to know, you should’ve shown up, sucka.

I’ll be tidying up Maassive.com over the holiday break. I’ll be categorizing everything, fixing my broken link page, deleting the hotlinked images that are attracting all the spambots, etc, etc, etc. If I get really bored, I may even reinstall Wordpress, the software I use for this site.

I’m also considering a “motto” change. Tell me what you think of this:

And no, I’m not taking Jonny off the banner. Feel free to suggest ways to modify, reconstruct or redesign him. I’m not opposed to that at all.

Darfur Soon
Santa Fe stands up, PERA does not.
This will probably be my last piece on Sudan divestment in New Mexico for awhile. It’s a nice piece to cap off with: activists in the community have organized a huge Darfur awareness event this weekend, and the City has even declared it an official event. Meanwhile, however, the state pension board has yet to consider divesting from the “highest offender” oil and gas companies doing business in Sudan, despite increasing pressure, both from gov’t employees and our paper.

There’s Something About Bill: Political Canvases
NM artists brush up on Bill’s campaign.
This week, 65 local artists are donating their work to Gov. Bill Richardson’s campaign. Thing is, not all of them are actually endorsing him for the Democratic Nomination

Well, whaddya know? Maassive.com got plugged on television.

The other staff writer here at the Reporter, David Alire Garcia, is a co-host on a current events talk show called “NM inFOCUS” that runs Friday nights on Albuquerque’s PBS station. A couple weeks ago, DAG was interviewing US Senate Candidate Leland Lehrman, who the day before just so happened to be the subject of a hit column called “Hey! That’s Not an Alt-Weekly” by AAN Executive Director Richard Karpel. I’d subsequently written a blog rebuttal. DAG hit him with a few quotes and asked him to defend his paper. The exchange occurs about 5:30 minutes in:

Yesss!

It looks like I’ve got a candidate for the Arizona Presidential ballot. No official announcement yet. More details soon.

BBC has an in-depth (read: long) article on the political hurdles stalling MIT’s $100 Laptop project. These super cheap, fully-functional, hand-crankable laptops would’ve made an enormous difference back at Buduburam. Here’s the lede:

A lack of “big thinking” by politicians has stifled a scheme to distribute laptops to children in the developing world, a spokesman has said. Walter Bender of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) said politicians were unwilling to commit because “change equals risk”.

OLPC has also opened distribution of the super-awesome laptops to the public under a very, very generous scheme. If you donate $399 to the cause, one laptop will be sent to a child in the developing world and one will be sent to any child of your choosing. They’ve just extended the cut off until Dec. 31, so this is actually a pretty damned sweet Xmas present. Click here for more details.

The Mist

Nearly flawless in its adaptation, The Mist was everything I imagined as a kid.

Okay, okay, you want a semi-spoiler? Click “more,” to read a succinct and fairly unrevealing explanation of how I would reedit the ending.

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Whoa … I made Slashdot today with my nuclear reactor article. As of 4:30pm, there were 377 comments. This always happens when I write tech pieces. My Chatterbox Challenge piece made Fark.com.

If you’re a BSG nerd, check out my Film.com debate with MaryAnn Johanson on Razor’s cheese, gender politics and ambiguous ending.

For the first time in more than a year, I’ll be back on stage this Tuesday doing my performance thing. I’ll be participating in Liar’s Night, a 10-year-old Santa Fe tradition, in which local storytellers compete to tell the best lie (though, one person is always telling truth and it’s up to the audience to guess). Here’s the write-up from Pasatiempo:

The event starts 8pm at the Cowgirl and costs $10 at the door. My story lasts about eight minutes, and I imagine a video might be posted on host/founder Jim Terr’s website with some of the others.