Mike O'Connell

This post has been coming for two or three years now. It’s sensitive, yes, but not time sensitive, and really could appear today or any day in the Trump era. Today just happens to be the day.

Much of the controversy surrounding our current president is his use of a particular social media platform. That would be Twitter, which is, depending on your opinion, the greatest or most useless application ever created.

It is on the subject of opinions that we address Mr. Trump’s use of Twitter.

Twitter, like most social media and indeed most things in life, allows us to see what we want to see. I suppose this has always been true; in the early days of this country there were “party” newspapers and one could read the news though political lenses of particular partisan slants. This is all the more true in the social media era. One literally chooses to “follow” certain newscasters and news organizations. The days of “the news” or “the newspaper” are over. But we’ve discussed that many times.

What Trump has done, by his use of Twitter, is no different from what other presidents have done using the “new” media of their day. I think the three greatest examples of this are arguably the three most popular presidents of the last century. In the 1930s it was Franklin Roosevelt who brought us his “fireside chats” via the new medium of radio. A generation later it was John F. Kennedy who looked so cool and confident on TV that it may have swung a close election his way. And it was Ronald Reagan, 20 years later, who used TV to its greatest potential, bringing his version of the fireside chat to the homes of his constituents in the 1980s.

TV and radio were game-changing technology. So too the Internet. To me the true forerunners of using the Internet in politics were two gentlemen who had no business on the national scene, but used said technology to catapult them into the light. The first was Ross Perot, at the end of the last century, and the next was Howard Dean, at the beginning of this one. Two longshot presidential hopefuls really showed the rest of us how to use the Internet, first to raise money and then to get messages out, over the heads of the traditional media and to the American public directly. This is what you do if you don’t have the party apparatus or the media behind you: you find another way. That’s Trump on Twitter in a nutshell. He doesn’t need “the media” or the Republican establishment to get his thoughts directly to you. Like his tweets or not (and I’ll admit, many I find wrongheaded), he’s communicating directly with the American public.

If you liked Trump, you’d think it was brilliant.

That’s the bottom line, really. How you feel about the messenger is how you’ll feel about the message. If it were a politician you liked (Obama, Hillary, or any president or presidential hopeful past), and he or she was using Twitter the way Trump uses Twitter, you’d think it was brilliant. Remember, we see what we want to see in the Internet, and in the media, and this is becoming more and more true as the Internet and social media break down traditional news, information, and entertainment gatekeepers.

Reason number 1,784,259 why it’s more fun to be a scientist than a partisan.

It’s here. This is the summer event we’re really waiting for…

Shark Week!

Older than Twitter, older than Facebook, older than most people I know, Shark Week still dominates summer TV schedules three decades in.

Thank God I’ve spent most of my adult life working with 10-year-olds who are able to keep me apprised of such things.

Baseball’s All-Star game is now a week-long celebration, and this week that celebration came to my hometown (sort of), Washington, D.C. It was the first time our nation’s capital hosted the midsummer classic in 49 years.

They’ll get another chance sooner than that.

First, Monday evening… the Home Run Derby, so much cooler since the clock and bracket format were introduced (sacrilege in a way but ultimately not). This event, literally, was years in the making. Ever since we knew this game would be in D.C. we awaited a certain Mr. Harper’s participation. He participated and then some. His moment was reminiscent of Derek Jeter’s final Yankee Stadium at bat, a comparison I do not use lightly (like comparing a president to Lincoln or a playwright to Shakespeare). Harper’s final minute of regulation, during which he (and his dad!) prevailed against long odds to claim the derby crown, was the greatest moment in Washington sports since, well, the Caps a month ago, but a hell of a long time before that one.

Then there was the game.

Well, that one could have gone better from a National League fan perspective. Yes, first time in my life rooting for the NL in the All-Star game. A game with 10 home runs should be pretty fun to watch. It was. And it gave credence to those who say the game is now only strikeouts and home runs. (There were 25 of the former, by the way.) Pitching, fundamentals, and three-run home runs, right? Well, then AL had its three-run homer. A two-run game-tying blast in the bottom of the ninth from Scooter Gennett just wasn’t enough. Exciting, but not enough.

Still, a great game. And a great moment. And seriously… Harper Monday night… that was magic.

Gonna be the greatest moment at Nats Park until they roll out the World Series bunting.

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock on some distant planet the past week or so you’ve heard that there’s this Kavanaugh guy set to be a new Supreme Court justice following the retirement of Anthony Kennedy. I’ve heard everything from this guy’s our savior to this guy’s the devil. I find it all very uninteresting. Honestly, if they didn’t tell us, and they swapped out one guy on the Supreme Court for another, could any of us really tell the difference?

(I kind of feel the same way about the pope.)

Like most people in 2018 I’m never away from the Internet for more than a few hours (or a few minutes) at a time. From this past June 25 to July 2, however, I was traveling internationally with spotty Internet and news coverage at best. During this time there were exactly two pieces of information I was able to glean from traveler scuttlebutt:

1. Anthony Kennedy was retiring the Supreme Court. Yawn.
2. LeBron James was going to the Lakers.

What?!

This is news. This is going to be noticeable. LeBron in L.A.? All nine Supreme Court justices could walk down my street naked and I’d still be more interested in LeBron’s going to Lakers.

Priorities, people. Priorities.

Starbucks announced earlier this morning it is eliminating plastic straws from its locations, phasing out all said products by 2020.

Straws?

I’ve got news. If you’re drinking coffee out of a straw you’ve got bigger problems than any environmental damage wrought by bits of plastic.