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Well, Ocean Isle was nice, but there's only so much sleeping 'til 10 a.m., eatin' fresh seafood and downin' lots of red wine and daiquiris that one human being can stand.

In my absence, colleague Melissa Umbarger's N&R cooking blog, Mel's Kitchen, made its debut. She had been food-blogging on her own for a couple of months independently of the N&R, and even if you're not a huge foodie, I think you'll like this. She had me at the part about poaching salmon in the dishwasher.

I should know this, but I don't and right this second I don't have time to find out on my own: Does anyone know of any free WiFi available on/around Tate Street and/or Spring Garden Street in the vicinity of UNCG? E-mail me or answer in the comments. Thanks!

What to do, what to do.

This is the first time I've ever been asked to speak at an event I couldn't afford to attend. It's also proof positive that if you blog long enough, you'll eventually end up on a panel with Wonkette. Or at least be a speaker at the same event as she.

On the plus side, I and fellow citizen-journalism evil genius Susan DeFife of Backfence.com (more info on her here) will be quizzed, the way James Lipton does it on "Inside the Actors Studio," by Dan Gillmor, author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People," for an audience of a couple of hundred people who will be paying close to $700 to be there (many of whom will be liveblogging the event). He had a conversation with N&R staffers and some local bloggers back in February, and a good time was had by all, so it should be fun. I'd love to stay for the whole thing -- and would love even more to spend some extra time in New York catching up with old friends -- but that's two days before ConvergeSouth, so I'll probably just do an Ed and fly up and back the same day.

If you're not a U.S. senator (and given the readership of this blog, the odds that you are not are merely huge, rather than astronomical), you might be saying, "Gee, Lex, suppose I wanted to ask Supreme Court nominee John Roberts a question. How could I do that?"

That's a good question, and as it happens, I have a couple of answers for you.

If you're a Democrat, you might want to hit this Web site, set up by seven female Democratic U.S. senators, and submit your questions. I think I should point out here that none of the seven are actually members of the Judiciary Committee, which is the group that will actually be asking Roberts questions, although one of the group, Barbara Boxer, is from the same state (California) as a committee member, Dianne Feinstein. Maybe they talk. I don't know.

If you're a Republican, your best bet is to contact committee chairman Arlen Specter using this form (scroll down).

I think it would be enlightening, inasmuch as there is no constitutional requirement that Supreme Court justices even be lawyers, to require all future nominees to have to answer questions from 100 randomly chosen average nonlawyer Americans. Live on C-SPAN, maybe. I could be wrong. It could be a huge waste of time. But I suspect we'd learn something useful about each nominee.

I first became aware of the existence of Hank Steuver when I stumbled into a session he led at the 1999 National Writers' Workshop in Atlanta. I'd never read a word he had written up to that point, but I walked out of there a diehard fan. At the time, IIRC, he was writing for the Austin American-Statesman in Texas; soon thereafter, he joined The Washington Post's Style section, which is the most appropriate venue in American newspaperdom for him, if in fact there is an appropriate venue in newspaperdom for him, which I wonder about.

Asked, as other Post staffers have been, to write a critique of the Post, he went all meta and critiqued the act of critiquing newspapers. If you ever think I might have gone and swallowed way too much Kool-Aid over this whole open-source journalism/Very Local Journalism/Town Square thing, please know that I'm also reading things like this Steuver piece as a bracing tonic to keep from going off the deep end. Also? It's funny, particularly the ending, and it's not very long, so even you have time to read it.

All manner of alleged illegalities are under investigation in Washington, but as writer Michael Kinsley noted a long time ago, the real problem with Washington is what's legal. The Washington Post's Jeffrey Birnbaum, who has been dealing with this subject at least since the S&L scandal of the late 1980s, reminds us of this phenomenon with this useful article that I only just got around to reading.

(More here)

Holy jumping cats!

(And how does his floor stay so clean with two cats?)

Via Cyberjournalist.net comes news of the annual media salary survey conducted by UGa's mass-comm school.

Median salaries ranked as follows:
Online publishing: $32,000
Cable TV: $30,000
Consumer magazines: $27,000
Daily newspapers: $26,000
Weekly newspapers: $24,000
TV: $23,492
Radio: $23,000

You combine those print salary figures -- "median," remember, means half of those surveyed make more and half make even less -- with Jay Rosen's new elegy, "Things I Used to Teach That I No Longer Believe ... " and you start to wonder why anyone would even go into this bidness in the first place.

I can answer that question, of course, but I'm curious as to what you think.

If Bloggers Had Been Around Throughout History (possibly NSFW; mild language).

To raise money for a press-freedom organization, some well-known authors are auctioning off the right to name characters in their upcoming works.

Man. Too bad we're stuck with that pesky factual-accuracy hangup. Otherwise, we could auction off the rights to name people appearing in news stories, and that would raise enough money so we could restore The New York Times News Service and hire some extra reporters.

Right?

It's quiet. Too quiet.

That's because we've kind of taken care of all the stuff that's quick 'n' easy, and the stuff we're working on now is more complicated and requires more behind-the-scenes effort up front. Community editor Betsi Robinson and her team are putting together the Summerfield online/print section. Our tech folks will be tweaking the home page a bit more, including adding a tab for Public Square-related features such as YourNews, as soon as they get some non-Public-Square stuff off their plates (such as GoTriad's Readers Choice project). I'm compiling a database of info on News Department employees to which each staffer's byline eventually will link, and I'm also pulling together data for a capital-budget request so we can get some more cool toys essential hardware to greatly increase our multimedia production capability.

We're also recruiting staff internally for some additional blogs that will deal with the general subjects of pets and TV shows. JR is still deciding what the ultimate formats will turn out to be.

But all is not frozen behind the curtain. On Monday, I'm delighted to announce, N&R staffer Jim Schlosser will begin blogging at Architecture, Artifacts and Antiquity (whether or not the banner graphic is finished by then).

Jim brings to the subject his unique, engaging and award-winning writing style; his deep knowledge and love of all things Greensboro; and a passionate layman's interest in architecture. If you liked "Urban Image," the column he wrote for the N&R's CityLife section in the mid-1990s, you'll love this blog.

The blog is intended to complement, not compete with, A Little Urbanity, a blog written by classics professor David Wharton, who also sits on the Greensboro Historic District Commission. Although Wharton discusses historic buildings and architecture from time to time, he mainly focuses on more current and big-picture issues. Jim will be spending more time on the history of our community and using his bright writing to bring the past alive. I can't wait.

UPDATE: There'll be one other interesting new feature, too, but it's Allen's baby, so I'll let him tell you about it when he's ready.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Town Square tab is now up on the home page.

The World Beard and Moustache Championships are being held Oct. 1 in Berlin ...

... and it looks like JR has entered!

Erstwhile N&R guest columnist Paul Chesser, who hit a national audience last month with a column in The Washington Times, reaches an even bigger audience with this column in The Washington Post (thanks to Phred for pointing it out).

The American Legion has declared an end to the "end the war" movement. Really:

NEW YORK -- The American Legion, which has 2.7 million members, has declared war on antiwar protestors, and the media could be next. Speaking at its national convention in Honolulu, the group's national commander called for an end to all "public protests" and "media events" against the war, constitutional protections be damned.

"The American Legion will stand against anyone and any group that would demoralize our troops, or worse, endanger their lives by encouraging terrorists to continue their cowardly attacks against freedom-loving peoples," Thomas Cadmus, national commander, told delegates at the group's national convention in Honolulu.

The delegates vowed to use whatever means necessary to "ensure the united backing of the American people to support our troops and the global war on terrorism."

Cadmus added: "It would be tragic if the freedoms our veterans fought so valiantly to protect would be used against their successors today as they battle terrorists bent on our destruction, so we're just going to act as if those freedoms don't exist and never did."

OK, I made up the part in bold. But when fewer than 40 percent of Americans approve the president's handling of Iraq and almost 60 percent say some or all American troops should be pulled out of the country, and at least one prominent, likely GOP candidate for president in 2008 thinks we're losing the war, declaring "war" on antiwar protests strikes me as a bit presumptuous, whatever your politics.

Besides, the ominous language of "any means necessary" notwithstanding, is the American Legion really prepared to have its members go to jail for assault, or worse? Is it going to be paying their lawyers? Paying damages to the victims when the inevitable lawsuits come rolling in against it?

I'm on record: "You break it, you bought it" pretty much summarizes what I think the U.S. position toward Iraq ought to be right now. We owe Iraqis more than chaos. But, unlike the American Legion, I also understand that serious, reasonable people can disagree on this issue -- and, more importantly, must remain free to do so if this country is to find its best path forward.

If the Legion needs a reminder of what we're fighting for, and it clearly does, it could do much worse than to read one veteran of Iraq's take on that subject, here.

Back in July, you'll recall, I talked about our plans for an online Summerfield site with a print component, with community residents writing about their community for online and the best submissions being included in a weekly print page. Community Editor Betsi Robinson, who is overseeing this effort, has come up with a name for it: Hometown Hubs.

Earlier this week, tech maestros Charlie Stafford and Kevin Lockamy met with me, Betsi and the senior writer on Betsi's team, Tom Steadman, to talk about the practical aspects of getting the online component of Summerfield's Hometown Hub up and going.

We'll be launching the site in a few weeks, and this afternoon Betsi and I met with JR and Managing Editor Ann Morris to figure out where else we might launch Hometown Hubs later this year. We settled on two that we hope to launch before year's end and two more we hope to launch soon thereafter, and the only reason I'm not telling you now where they are is that we have to notify some people in-house first, and some of them are still burning vacation.

The initial focus of Hometown Hubs is on geographic communities, but we think the concept will work for communities of interest, as well. I'll be talking more about these projects as we get more details nailed down, and as always, if you have any thoughts on what they should include, give me or Betsi a shout.

We've gotten sound files from this past weekend's second round of hearings held by the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For ease of use, we'll be cutting them into a separate file for each speaker before posting them. Not sure how long that will take; my PC (which isn't built for serious audio/video editing) just crashed when I tried to open the first file. So, uh, stay tuned.

After technical delays, for which I apologize, the N&R now has sound files from this past weekend's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings up here in both downloadable and streaming formats. In addition to Ed Whitfield and Joya Wesley of the TRC, I'd like to thank our Kevin Lockamy and Mike Fuchs for making this happen.

In recent years, the term "weather porn" has been coined to describe the, uh, orgy of overcoverage often devoted to weather events. Lotsa heat, not so much light, to coin a phrase.

Even allowing for the fact that Hurricane Katrina likely will end up the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, much of the coverage hasn't been all that informative.

But this post at Kathryn Cramer's blog shows how bloggers, using the (relatively) new Web tools Google Earth and Flickr to illustrate storm damage in the New Orleans area better than most of what you've seen on TV or on the TV networks' Web sites. They're bringing light to a hot topic.