While I was away, Wired News highlighted the Manchurian Candidate blogads in a nice piece about Hollywood “getting” blogs and other creatures on wilder side of the web. As it turns out while I was away, Paramount doubled the original order. Fantastic!

Ever brilliant, Ken Layne recalls the hype about new media — including Hunter T — at past conventions. (Ken and Charlie Hornberger returned from Exile in Central Europe in 1997 to conceive one of the first and funniest link-heavy news sites — www.tabloid.net (Seems the URL no longer works?))

We spent last week on the outer banks. I read about the D-convention every day in the Times, Post and WSJ and enjoyed the blogger articles.

Submersion in the elemental rhythms — tides, waves, day/night — wiped clean my mental clock. We bobbed and tumbled in the warm waves, tossed the baseball, dribbled sand spires, fished for blue crabs with chicken legs — I was shocked by how hard those things bite, watched heat-lightning and ruby-shot sunsets, put-putted beneath an osprey nest, erected sand-arches and domes, retrieved three horse-shoe crab tails and numerous jellyfish, found a dead skate and wandered through Kitty Hawk. Nieces Lauren and Caroline gave us a charming rendition of “he’s got the whole world in his hands.” Jogging on morning two, we found a dead sea turtle. Later that day it was bloated and bleaching, but people wandering by were still asking “is it alive?” and shrieking when a wave moved a flipper. The next day, the turtle had doubled in size and was graffitied.