A photo of Jason Clarke from the waist up, smiling at the camera wearing a brown corduroy sport coat and blue sweater

Hi, I’m Jason Clarke. I’m a family guy, writer, and digital strategist based in Orono, Maine. More about me →

General updates

  • Merry Christmas!

    Merry Christmas to you and yours, wherever you are!

  • My statement on OJ’s new book

    Via MSNBC, I just learned that my former publisher, ReganBooks, is putting out a book by O.J. Simpson titled “If I Did It.” According to news reports, the book will describe how Simpson “would have” killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, murders he was aquitted of in 1995. Although I value free speech, I also…

  • Set the bar high, despite the medium

    Today I received some announcement spam from Work.com, a new portal for businesses. Unfortunately, Work.com’s PR department didn’t exactly utilize the utmost care when sending out the announcement. Here’s the opening of the email they sent me: Hi Jason Clarke’s, As a website of valuable information for business, we wanted to tell you about our…

  • Deer in October

    Today on the way home from a family event, we were driving around while our son took a nap. On Route 2 in Old Town, Heidi noticed two big, beautiful deer in the front yard of somebody’s house eating from a tree. We turned around, and to our surprise, instead of running away, the deer…

  • Mobile phone stats, 2 years later

    Last year at this time, I reflected on my first anniversary of owning my mobile phone by providing some usage stats. Now that I’ve owned the phone for two years, I thought it might be fun to compile the stats for this past year (2005-2006) and then compare them to last year’s. Here we go:…

  • Exposing the hecklers

    Writing in The New York Times over the weekend, Jennifer Senior lays absolute waste to Louis Lapham’s new book, Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration, and in the process makes a truly fascinating and satisfying point about not just Lapham, but about a sad majority of President Bush’s harshest…

  • Some books I’ve read recently

    Some books I’ve read lately, in approximate reverse chronological order: Starlet, Robert B. Parker – 4 out of 5 stars My favorite Spenser novel so far. Again, a slow start builds to a thrilling, surprising, and organic conclusion. The fun of Spenser, combined with the constant literarly jabs, plus a usable plot make this an…

  • Signage

    While browsing my local university’s bulletin board, I noticed this line in an ad for the campus Amnesty International chapter: If you want to take an active stance against human rights then this group is for you!

  • My first check

    When I went to visit my Mom a couple weeks ago, I noticed an artifact on her fridge from my early days as a web developer: A copy of the first check I ever received from doing web development work: Click the photo to view it at full-size. FYI, here’s a snapshot of the resulting…

  • Think about this one for a minute: “Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.” –Samuel Johnson