Taking Note

Of some local and national news, before it gets too old:

YouTube's purge of Daily Show video really threw a monkey wrench into local vlogger's LiberalViewer's creative output.

One day, you are a minor YouTube celebrity with more than 1,850 subscribers to your personal channel and nearly 1 million viewings of your videos logged.

The next day -- poof! -- it's as if you never existed.

Such is the fate of Allen Asch, a Sacramento man who went by the nom de Web of LiberalViewer. When Viacom last week demanded that YouTube, the popular online video site, remove more than 100,000 videos containing unauthorized content, it meant that some of the LiberalViewer's work soon would be purged from the site.

Normally I don't link to sports stuff, but I liked the Sacramento Bee's Ailene Vosin's characterization of Las Vegas:

It isn't really true what they say about Las Vegas. What happens here doesn't really stay here, not unless the visit is brief and the departure exceptionally well-executed.

This city attaches to your skin the way cigarette stench clings to your clothing. Its influences can be repressed -- think of Vegas as a recurring virus -- but never entirely purged. And you must reside here to fully appreciate the fact that although this is a fun place to visit, in decades past, this was a fascinating place to live.

... As we drove west from Brooklyn, N.Y., that summer in the early 1960s, I was California dreamin', hoping the family car would continue toward the home of the Beach Boys, surfboards and desirable soft sand. Instead, the car broke down, and my father immediately obtained a job cooking at a diner called "The Thief of Baghdad." A couple of city kids became desert rats exposed to a lifestyle so unique -- so bizarre -- it's hard to keep a straight face when NBA Commissioner David Stern muses about the league coming to town and offering family-style entertainment.

People who have trouble talking finances are confessing their indebtedness online. The Web is an excellent confessional:

When a woman who calls herself Tricia discovered last week that she owed $22,302 on her credit cards, she could not wait to spread the news. Tricia, 29, does not talk to her family or friends about her finances, and says she is ashamed of her personal debt.

Yet from the laundry room of her home in northern Michigan, Tricia does something that would have been unthinkable — and impossible — a generation ago: she goes online and posts intimate details of her financial life, including her net worth (now negative $38,691), the balance and finance charges on her credit cards, and the amount of debt she has paid down since starting a blog about her debt last year ($15,312).

Excellent idea!

Which reminds me... Did I mention my $2,200 night at Thunder Valley last week? No? Ugh!