Elizabeth Spiers does a mirror-true interview with a coke buyer about her dream of “the perfect dealer.” Blog reportage at its best.

We went to a friend’s house last night for pizza. In her studio, there were nine 15-30 inch Piaste gongs she’d been given after hanging out a decade ago at the factory in Germany. I’ve always thought of gongs as things that go “boom” or “bong.” Turns out that if you mallet a good big gong repeatedly, a series of harmonic permutations emerge. It’s a kind of layer cake of sound; it’s like you are peeling peals off an orchestral onion. I swear that her big gong gave a twenty second French horn tone and later produced a clear trumpet peal and then a flute… all while roaring and groaning and sizzling and screaming. I’ll add a big Piaste gong to my “list of things to splurge on if I ever win the lottery.”

Am I the only person who saw the Two Towers without first seeing the Fellowship of the Ring? (I was marooned in France, and babysitters were expensive and… )

Gee, I was appalled by TT. I was a bonefide Tolkeinite in my teens but have to say that TT, seen in a vacuum, was trite, juvenile and plastic. I’ve seen more believable characters and gripping action in a dubbed Godzilla movie.

So I rented Fellowship of the Ring on video and saw where TT was coming from. But let this be said, oh mortal moviegoers, the second act does not hold water on its own.

While everyone focuses on the elimination of the dividend tax, it seems that capital gains taxes will also fall under Bush’s plan. The WSJ explains: “Say a share is bought for $100 and the company has $6.50 a share in fully taxed profits that year. The company will notify the shareholder of this. Then, suppose the share is sold for $110, for a $10 profit. The capital-gains tax will apply only to $3.50 of the gains ($10 minus $6.50.) Each year, a holder will be able to increase his “basis” — the cost for figuring out his gain on shares held, for tax purposes — by the amount of the company’s taxed profits.” This will be a bookkeeping nightmare for shareholders, but I guess their pain will be well compensated.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at scifi publisher Tor Books and a blogger, has bought rights to publish a new book by John Scalzi, a consultant and blogger. Patrick read the book, called “Agent to the Stars” on John’s site.

Asked whether this “already published” status could hurt the book’s sales, Patrick comments: “What it seems to me that we’re learning about online free (or cheap) distribution of fiction e-texts is that, sometimes at least, it doesn’t hurt the sale of print editions and may even help it. Data points: Scott Card giving away e-texts on his website. Baen Books’ various promotions and sales of e-texts. The latest David Weber hardcover extravaganza included a CD-ROM bound into the back cover, containing e-texts of all the previous books in the series. I will bet you lunch that this caused the sale of more David Weber backlist print editions than it cost. With fiction, at any rate, people mostly don’t say ‘I don’t need a printed book, I have an e-text.’ I’m sure some do. But mostly they say “I’m intrigued by the taste I got from this e-text, so I’m going to go buy a more-comfortable-to-read printed book now. But you know something? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all this is just an artifact of a temporary ‘comfort gap’ between e-texts and printed books. Maybe ten years from now it will be all different. Maybe aspiring writers should be entirely wary of letting their prose onto the net. What I know is that I liked Scalzi’s book and, in the two minutes I spent considering the fact that it had ‘already been published’ on the Web, my basic conclusion was ‘so what.’ Right now, in his case at least, this seems not so much a bug as a feature. Applicability to other cases? Unknown.”

The Columbia Journalism Review asks 13 teams of young journalists to imagine their dream newspaper. Seems they want blogs, but just don’t know it.

eBay has launched its program offering health insurance to its elite sellers and their families. As the Internet continues to both atomize traditional corporations and empower new classes of entrepreneurs, we will see more programs that deliver corporate-style benefits to affiliated individuals. Yes, that means I would love to see Blogads health insurance some day. (I found this on auction news site Auctionbytes, which is itself a brilliant example of Internet publishing entrepreneurship.)

As many as 115,000 people sell more than $1,000 a month on eBay and could qualify as Powersellers, says Ina Steiner, editor or Auctionbytes.

As some Democrats ponder erecting a cable network to get out their message, Greg Beato comments “the conservatives didn’t succeed by bankrolling me-too entries into established media; they succeeded by pioneering new forms, i.e. talk-radio and partisan cable news. The new medium now, of course, is the Internet. And the new form is the blog. So instead of scoffing at ‘obscure Internet Web sites,’ why not support them?” He suggests the Democrats fund 200 bloggers. This democratic approach would no doubt go against the grain, but “giving up control of the medium is probably your best shot at regaining control of the message,” says Greg.

Working on a secret print project, Ken Layne is reminded that the jig is up for print…: “I’ve taken to singing a variation of “Yesterday” when reading the L.A. Times: ‘Yesterday, all these stories were already played, now they seem so old and oh so lame, oh I read this crap yesterday.’ Try working on a weekly. Jesus, what’s the point? Well, the point is to Add Value, the way The Economist or Weekly Standard or NYT Week in Review adds value: get a bunch of good writers and let them make sense of it all. Even then, it’s too late. Today’s Week in Review missed some pretty obvious stuff, because the articles were finished on Wednesday or Thursday and edited early Friday.”

Yesterday I watched three of Jeff Jarvis’ “vlogs,” his self-produced videos of himself committing punditry.

I was skeptical. Though I know Jeff is charming in person and persuasive in text, I wasn’t excited about sitting through three self-edited minutes of punditizing. Since video isn’t easily scanned and sifted like text, I thought I’d quickly run out of patience waiting for his bon mots.

I was wrong. First, Jeff delivered a steady stream high quality ideas and amusement. If anything, I was sorry he didn’t deliver more slowly so I could transcribe some of his points. (Then I realized Jeff posted a transcript.) Second, the reward of additional information — expression, cadence, tone — more than compensated my inability to fast-forward or click on links. I was reminded (yet again) why meatings achieve so much more than phone, IM or e-mail.

For bloggers looking to convince or cajole, vlogs will be an essential tool.

I watched three vlogs. I’d give “Year-end media cliches” 2 stars for tone and content. “Christmas 2002” gets 4 stars for content and 3 stars for tone (the graphics distracted.) My favorite was “Fast food fades,” which was full of swiftly delivered, tasty nuggets of fact and opinion. Jeff rightly concludes, “The problem may not be that the burger culture is fading… It may be that the Boomer culture is fading.” Ten stars!

(Two quibbles: like their blog cousins, all vlogs should be dated and need separate URLs.)