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Back in July, I pointed to a YouTube video of an NBC Nightly News broadcast from July 4, 1972. Here’s another one, found via Boing Boing, featuring a young Karl Rove in his role in the Young Republicans as the “GOP College Director”. Then-reporter “Gunga Dan” Rather describes Rove’s group in a voice-over as “an operation aimed at embarrassing pundits who say that Nixon doesn’t appeal to youth.”

The voice is the same, but this is a skinnier Rove, sporting a look that might have been considered a little “square” among some of his college peers in 1972, but would give him indie rocker cred today:

Rove interviews quite well, and you can see the future Republican strategist in the young fella in the video, talking about how to reach a younger audience.

Here’s an interesting still from the piece: those are Karl Rove’s hands holding the “Generation Of Peace” bumper sticker, which highlights the first letters in each word. For those of you not familiar with American politics, “GOP” — short for “Grand Old Party” — is a nickname for the Republican Party, in the same way that word “Tory” is often used to refer to the Conservative Party in Canada and the UK.

It’s interesting, because only a few years prior to this newscast, the use of the word “peace” was considered to be controversial. I remember reading in The Pop Sixties: A Personal and Irreverent Guide that the “goodbye” segment of an episode of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was cut because Tommy Smothers said “Please talk peace”. I get the feeling that these bumper stickers must’ve raised a few eyebrows in the upper echelons of the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

As for Rove today, does he still know how to reach the kids through their culture? Watch this video of Washington’s latest hip-hop sensation: “MC Rove” at this year’s Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner:

(This was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)

I’ve known Bill Sweetman since the mid-nineties, back when I worked at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, so I was very pleased to find out that Tucows — the company where I hold the title of Technical Evangelist — has hired him as General Manager of our domain name portfolio.

Bill writes:

I’m going to be leading the charge to further monetize that portfolio as well as develop new products and services related to the portfolio. Translation: I’m going to be performing Domain Name Karate as a full-time job!

When presented with the opportunity to turn my long-held passion for domain names into a full-time gig, I leaped at the chance. This was truly one of those ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunities’ and I knew I’d regret turning it down. Plus, I get to work again with Ken Schafer and a great team of people who are equally passionate about the domain name space.

It’s good to have you on the team, Bill. Welcome to the herd!

Original photo provided by Miss Fipi Lele.

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I’ve always found information and propaganda from the early days of the Cold War rather fascinating. If you feel the same way, I’ve got some interesting reading for you — a Flickr photoset of scans of fallout shelter literature.

The set is made up of scans from:

• A 1963 pamphlet titled You Can Protect Your Family from Fallout, which was produced by the Detroit-based Kelsey-Hayes Company, a manufacturer of fallout shelters
• A 1961 Life magazine feature on fallout shelters

(This was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)

More tutorial goodness for those of you who are getting started writing Facebook apps, and especially if you’re attending next Tuesday’s Facebook Developer Garage [here’s the wiki page | here’s the Facebook event]: I’ve got another Facebook developer tutorial up on the Tucows Developer Blog. This one covers the “Friends” methods of the FacebookRestClient class.

(This was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)

Hey, budding Facebook developers! I’ve got another installment of my series of articles on Facebook development: Using the FacebookRestClient Class’ “Event” Methods, Part 2.

Machete: a classic example of a hoarder! A still from Machete, one of the fake trailers from the movie Grindhouse.
Click to view the trailer (warning: swearing, topless women).

Paul Graham usually writes about programming and the business of technology, but his most recent essay is one a little more everyday: it’s about stuff. Many people have written on the topic before, but since I’ve been doing a fair bit of decluttering lately, it caught my attention.

Here’s how the article starts:

I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can’t afford a front yard full of old cars.

It wasn’t always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don’t have closets. In those days people’s stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I’m surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they’d be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews’ rooms the bed is the only clear space.

Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven’t changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.

Read the rest…