Things have been moving way too fast and I’ve been way too busy to say anything intelligent about the events in Egypt — it’s like commenting on fireworks as they are going off. Though Twitter and Facebook have proved more than mere tools of commentary for those in the actual revolution. They have provided tools for the revolution itself, probably not what Mark Zuckerberg had in mind.

The arguments of Malcolm Gladwell and the Net Delusion’s Evgeny Morozov — that the very social-network tools that were credited for spreading dissent in Iran and China have or will become tools of repression and worse in some of those same places — seem a little beside the point now. Behind such skepticism, as healthy as it is, seems to be a kind of deep human cynicism — all the more surprising in Gladwell who has made a fortune promoting the idea of tipping points and connectors. I guess it’s okay if they’re his tipping points and connectors...

This is one those cases where the medium really is the message — or at least a value-neutral component of the message. Complaining about its use or potential misuse seems almost silly, like blaming the hammer after it’s been used in a fight instead of for building (or vice versa). The suspicion about the role the internet has and will play in the pursuit of freedom strikes me as no better than the suspicion any number of people grousing the wake of Mubarak’s overthrow (from the Tea Party paranoids to the Israelis to the right-wing think tankers) have about democracy.

Democracy is one of those open-source platforms — not owned by us, or the French, or the ancient Greeks — that needs to be used to be improved. If we don’t like the outcome of what a true democratic movement brings (and yes, I am well aware of the potential for the military barring any real reform in Egypt), we don’t really like democracy. It’s not about  our interests, stupid. And the fact that we try and make it so explains why we, as a nation, are so hated in many parts of the world.

As a co-worker of mine said, watching the angry demonstrators torch the Egyptian flag the night Mubarak at first refused to step down, “Isn’t it nice to see them burn somebody else’s flag for a change?”

So a local cafe went out of business, the Marquet on Fulton at South Portland. I heard about it from a friend, figured it had something to do with the fact that there are now about 18 cafes in a three block radius (the changing face of Fort Greene!) and that they insisted on closing promptly every day at 5 pm, despite the fact that no one was back from work that early in the week and no one was up that early on the weekends (despite all the caffeine). No great loss, though they had some nice pastries.

So I’m across the street this morning at Provisions, getting a cappuccino and pain au chocolat when I ask the barrista there if he knows if the other Marquets (there is one in Cobble Hill, at least another in the Village) are open. No idea. I can see a sign in the window of the now shuttered Marquet and determine, after I get my morning beverage, to walk over there and see what it  says. But the light is changing when I get outside and the street is icy and it would take an extra maybe five minutes to cross Fulton and read the sign…

So I don’t. And the moral of the story? Well, if you work in digital publishing, like me, and you’re using a new technology (or two) like we are, you are haunted by the idea that if people have even the slightest technical difficulty getting to what you are offering, they won’t. They just won’t cross that proverbial street to get that information. And worse yet (this is what really makes for the insomnia) they won’t tell you they didn’t. They won’t fill out a little customer satisfaction form and say, “Your site sucks.” As Steve Krug put it in his usability bible Don’t Make Me Think (quoting his wife), “If something is hard to use, I don’t use it as much.”

Or maybe at all.

It’s all relative to the desire for the information, of course. I spent a long time yesterday trying to log on to Al Jazeera English‘s live stream. I had competition and couldn’t connect to their server, I reckon. Sometimes a lot of people want the same content, especially when things are blowing up.

I was going to blog this weekend and was thinking of calling it Two Kinds of Crazy but since then a) I got sick and b) the crazy has just multiplied…

My wife and I watched Black Swan on Saturday night (a screener DVD we had gotten our hands on) in part to take a break from the shooting news. A light alternative, no — an homage to many Polanski films I thought (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant all came to mind) and a very successful one. But Natalie Portman’s Nina is horror movie crazy while the shooter in Tucson was just…crazy.

It was also apparent, even on early Saturday evening, that we were in for a news cycle of blame and deny, with Sarah Palin’s defenders saying those weren’t cross hairs on the congresswoman’s district, for goodness sake! They were “surveyors’ symbols,” because she wanted her followers to…survey the districts of congress people who voted for health care, or something.

Calling something what it isn’t is a time-honored Orwellian kind of crazy talk, of course. Very big in politics, what with death taxes and death panels, for that matter. Though I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that Palin and the Tea Party’s shoot-em-up language made Jared Loughner shoot Gabrielle Gifford — but neither did it have no effect.

What strikes me at this juncture, when the stew is still bubbling and talk of guns and rhetoric and personal freedom is once again the staple of every talk show and many a water cooler conversation, is how many of the same people who demonize rock music and pornography and video games for contributing to a culture of violence refuse to see how their rhetoric might effect a nutter like Loughner. If you want to talk about personal responsibility (and the right loves to), talk about your own. Look in the mirror and see if you see some crazy person looking back at you.

Oops, wrong movie.

Has there been a stranger sight, this political year, than Barack Obama coming out to hold a press conference with Bill Clinton? Yes, possibly: Obama leaving the lectern to attend a holiday party while the former president held forth for another half-hour.

It reminded me of the time Frank Sinatra, having dissed Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll in general years before, had the King on his TV show — they even performed a duet together! By then rock had conquered the airwaves (and the post-GI Elvis had lost his mojo anyway) but to see the former rivals link arms was still striking.

This of course comes in the wake of pundits wondering if Obama was having his signature moment now with his great tax compromise, that (like Clinton after his midterm losses) he was finding his voice and his passion in the middle. Passion may not be the word you associate with Obama — he’s more Nat King Cole than Sinatra — but I think those who think his moderating trend is a sell-out weren’t paying attention during the election.

Obama did not win because he was a liberal, or a progressive. He won because a lot of independents and even Republicans were dispirited after eight years of Bush ineptitude, and many were truly appalled by McCain’s choice of running mate (forget the other nutsy trappings of his campaign) A lot of people thought they were voting for a moderate, and a lot of people were right.

For those Democrats who think back on the Clinton years fondly (minor military skirmishes, economic prosperity), remember how the left hated him them? To say nothing of the GOP (and the press!), especially the right wing of the right wing. After running an interview with Clinton in a recent issue of Reader’s Digest, my wife got an email from a reader reminding her of the 50-plus murders BC was implicated in. (Turns out Vince Foster was just the tip of the iceberg.)

Those people are still out there, hating on Obama now. In fact they’re driving the GOP bandwagon, dressing like Nazis and making John Birch books bestsellers. When I heard that they had discovered an arsenic-based life form in Mono Lake I thought, of course! It’s called the Tea Party. Let’s see if the GOP can swallow them without poisoning itself.

Ever been to see a play, staged a block from your house, about an issue that you were personally engaged in for five years? Neither had I. But having just come back from In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards at the Irondale Center, next to the Lafayette Presbyterian Church, was kind of like having personal history repeat itself, practically in my bedroom.

As my wife said when we went to see Fair Game, the movie about the Valerie Plame affair, “It makes you mad all over again.”

Difference was we weren’t personally involved in the hoax the Bush administration concocted to get us into Iraq, and 100,000 lives and a half a trillion dollars weren’t lost in the battle with Bruce Ratner over Atlantic Yards. Just a neighborhood or two, a poignant fact captured terrifically by the six cast members of In the Footprint. The script was all taken from interviews done with principals in the battle, and public records. (The fight’s real villains, like Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, wouldn’t be interviewed; he is played in performance by a basketball.) The overall effect is a bit like Anna Deavere Smith, if there were six of her, and she sang. The troupe responsible, the Civilians, calls it “investigative theater.”

Too bad the newspapers didn’t think of that! The whole side-splitting, gut-wrenching tale is brought to quick life, and early death (kind of like the Atlantic end of Fifth Avenue) — we were out of there in under two hours. That was about the time that Ratner, Bloomberg, Pataki and all the other crooks who concocted this canard thought it would take them to run away with a big chunk of BK real estate. As members of the advisory board of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, we helped slow them down; I  was instrumental in getting Jonathan Lethem involved (he is represented in the play), and we hosted a fundraiser at our house, featuring readings by Jhumpa Lahiri and Jennifer Egan that raised nearly 25 grand for the legal battle against Ratner and his take-it-and-like project. But that kind of money is peanuts to people like him and the Russian billionaire who helped salvage the deal.

Which is precisely the point.