News You Can Bruise for 2008 March 26

Wed Mar 26 2008 22:15 Leonard's Miscellany:

Scott Rosenberg posted yesterday about attempts to make publicly available a political campaign's daily conference calls: information that's not proprietary but is only related to journalists, for no good reason. This reminded me of my personal political-records hobby-horse: the daily schedules of the President and of presidental candidates. I'm pretty sure they still send these out every day, and that you can get a presidential daily schedule by filing a FOIA request, but if you search the web for them you get, eg., this sample schedule for Gerald Ford. Hell, when I was on the Clark campaign I couldn't get a copy of the candidate's daily schedule, not that it affected me at all. It's just not organized for openness.
Recently there was a bit of a splash when Hillary Clinton released her daily schedules from back when she was First Lady, which I'd use as a news hook for this item if I cared about news hooks. Obviously this is quite low on the list of presidency-related things that would improve the world, but like I said it's my hobby-horse.
Sometimes I see something that's so cool I want to learn a foreign language so I can understand it. My mental list of languages to learn keeps growing over time, and it's surely an act of wild-eyed optimism to keep it because my prime language-learning days are behind me and I've got very little to show for it. Anyway, I'm pretty sure Japanese was already on the list, but it just moved higher because of Game Center CX.
As is traditional, there was a third item that I forgot.