Barack Obama, President-Elect of the United States(!)

First of all… Whew!

If you write, you kind of have to write on a day like this, an historic occasion if ever there was one. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is something I never thought would happen in my lifetime, and it is due both to the moment and, significantly, to the extraordinary character of Barack.

Maybe it was close earlier, maybe the Democratic candidate would have won anyway just on the strength of being the Anti-Bush, but there were two factors that decisively tipped it Obama's way. McCain's choice of the beauty pageant queen for his VP did send the hearts of the faithful to flutterin', but once revealed in Katy Couric's pivotal interview, Mrs. Palin caused everybody else to seriously doubt his judgment, and turn even conservative stalwarts like Christopher Buckley (William F.'s son, no less,) against him.

The other, less self-inflicted blow (given his legislative participation in the debacle,) was that little dust-up recently in the markets, the timing of which turned out so poorly for his campaign. Once again, It Was The Economy, Stoopit.

Note, though, that the all-but-complete count as I write this is roughly 53 million Democratic votes vs. 46 million Republican. That many people, a little over 46 percent of the voting population, voted for the maverick military-man version of the same old thing.

So how wise has it been of Obama, even through his victory speech, to strike a conciliatory, inclusive tone, recognizing the strong, deep differences that divide the people in this country, even as we face the same set of problems -- excuse me, "challenges." (Because it turns out, it actually does make a difference how we phrase these situations to ourselves.)

Yes, I got the chills, again, from his acceptance speech, especially when the crowd kept calling back, "Yes, we can!"

Some favorite views of the day:

History in the making: News headlines across the US - slide show, Boston Globe

Reactions from around the world - slide show, Huffington Post

World welcomes Obama with open arms, demands - Amanpour, CNN.com

What the world expects - BBC correspondents

Hey, NYT: What about Fair Use?

I was amused at a dialog that just popped up as I read one of David Pogue's columns in the New York Times. (I was going to add, "online," but then a dialog wouldn't have bluudy-well popped up out of the print edition, would it?)

From the NYT and “Powered by Rightslink, the copyright clearance center,” it offered to give me a “Quick Price Estimate for reproducing the article to use in your own materials."

By stating via pull-down menus that I was inquiring about republishing an “excerpt (max. 250 words)” on “a non-profit internet site” for three months, I was invited to pay $200 dollars, or $400 for a year. Oh, sure; I’m eager to pay for a quote that clearly would be covered under Fair Use.

That would be the “Fair use… doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test.”

(That’s in the words of the faceless, numberless contributors to the Wikipedia’s page on Fair Use.)

This is going to influence me to stop quoting the New York Times, who can perhaps be forgiven for trying to find additional ways to save the newspaper business but are making an unfortunate choice here. What has fueled the nearly universal adoption of the Internet is exactly the reasonable application of appropriating other people's material.

That's assuming, of course, that we're talking logically here, about quoting a small chunk of someone's work with proper linking/attribution. (As we know, unreasonable out-and-out theft of other people's intellectual property has also been rumored to occur; but that's not what we're talking about.)

"Giving Credit Where It’s Due" Dept.

One spirit which I've always found sadly missing from the Internet in general, from smaller, personal websites and pages to the e-mail output of the general populace, is of giving credit for things. Ever notice how few of those eternally popular e-mail collections of witticisms, the ones that thousands of people find just right and send around again and again, are absent any credit for authorship?

It's an odd psychology; I’ve always imagined it was the original senders fearfully thinking, 'If we take out the name of the person who wrote this, then we won't get caught for using it.' Not that this makes any sense, but why else?

So we've decided to start a series on the theme of Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due. (But don't worry, not in the common sense of, “Giving Credit Where We Reserve The Right To Jack Up The Rate Later.") The first subject:

The “Washington Post Style (not ‘Mensa’) Invitational”

No sooner had a friend reminded me recently of this highly witty collection of original words, which I remembered seeing a few years back, than a fresh copy of the same bit arrived from a family member. It was titled “The Washington Post Mensa Invitational,” where readers were invited to change just one letter of a word and supply a new meaning. Chances are you’ve seen these:

“Intaxification: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize that it was your money to start with.”

“Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.”

“Decafalon: The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.”

“Bozone: The substance surrounding slow-witted people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.”

But as funny as they were again, they were familiar; so since I’ve got the World’s Library plugged into my fingertips here, I got curious and decided to look into it a little further. Maybe I could find some editions from other years with more such clever nuggets. I did a search (I know, you’re supposed to say, “Googled it,” but do they really need any further endorsements?), and sure enough one of the first few entries noted some anomalies.

"The fact is, there is no such thing as a Washington Post Mensa Invitational. But a Factiva search shows that a few of these words appeared in a ‘Washington Post Style Invitational’ back in August 2, 1998,” some since-delinked commenter claimed. Further digging eventually revealed that this had indeed been one instalment in the regular Post feature, the Style Invitational (recent archives), which was begun and conducted at the time by one Gene Weingarten.

When I found this, I kept looking at his name, thinking it looked familiar. Well, sure enough, Gene used to be the editor of the Miami Herald’s Tropic Magazine, and as a former, unintentionally longtime Miami resident, I was very familiar with his name and photo.

It turns out that the Gene was the clever man, you might even say visionary, who got Dave Barry hired by the Herald, having discovered him "toiling in obscurity" for a small paper in an even smaller Pennsylvania town. (More twinned words: people never simply "work" in obscurity, they always "toil.")

Together, if I remember correctly, Weingarten, Barry and Tom Schroder also brainstormed and put on the Tropic Hunt, an annual scavenger hunt that savagely taxed the brains of the couple thousand people who would turn out every year, to spend a comical, frenzied afternoon racing around trying to interpret sheets of riddles for clues to a master puzzle. People would howl, with some mix of mock indignation and astonishment, when the unimaginably intricate solutions to each step were read out loud by Barry at the end.

So, Gene Weingarten, This Is Your Life (according to the Wikipedia). Thanks for facilitating all that fun, and glad to see you're still at it.