By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
February 18, 2005, 7:40 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Our thoughts are
with those who were touched by the Station fire, two years ago Sunday.
Da
Vinci Code Goes on Trial Without A Defense: AP. The Scotsman wrote
the headline about the can of worms going public in Vinci, Italy..
Art
experts and conservative clerics were putting the blockbuster novel The Da
Vinci Code on trial in the art master’s home town tonight.
Concerned about the legions of fans of the book who take claims in the book
as gospel truth, the mock tribunal aims to sort out fact from fiction.
The event in Vinci, just outside Florence, was to begin tonight with an
opening statement by Alessandro Vezzosi, director of a Leonardo da Vinci
museum, who said he will produce photographs and documents as evidence of
the mistakes and historical inaccuracies contained in Dan Brown’s book.
“Leonardo is misrepresented and belittled,” Vezzosi said. “His
importance is misunderstood, he was a man full of fantasy, inventions and
genius.”
Vezzosi said he will produce evidence through 120 photographs based on documents
and paintings with the aim of “reassessing and disclaiming the author” of
the mystical thriller, a mix of code-breaking, art history, secret societies,
religion and lore....
...Organisers said there would be nobody speaking in the Da Vinci Code’s
defence and the “verdict” would be contained within the presentations
of the speakers.
But that didn’t mean the book would be completely hung out to dry:
hundreds of the book’s fans were expected to attend the trial at Vinci’s
Palazzina Uzielli....
Coincidentally, Elmer A. Ordoñez of The Manila Times just got around
to reading The Da Vinci Code, along with one of the more than 10 books AP alludes
to that aim to debunk the book. This one is The
Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code: A Challenging Response to the Bestselling Novel by
Richard Abanes, author of Harry
Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick among other "response" books.
Ordoñez notes (Fact
versus fiction),
Abanes, like any reader, could just dismiss the novel as fiction—both
in the literary and pejorative sense of the word. But to come up with another
book, which would certainly be appreciated by the keepers of the Christian
faith—who historically have to put up with the usual suspects as enemies—seems
to cash in too on sales of his book. Or is he acting alone?
The main thrust of Abanes’ response to the novel is that Brown used
the forged papers planted by Plantard (the founder of a 20th century Priory
of Sion) in the Bibliotheque Nacional—known as Les Dossiers Secrets.
Had Brown known that the documents were forged would he still write The Da
Vinci Code in its present form?...
I don't follow theological history, and I read Dan Brown's book a long time
ago, so no opinion I might have on this is either fresh or informed. If you
want to follow that yellow brick road, be my guest. Here's what the Web throws
up:
Priory
Of Sion: The Facts, The Theories, The Mystery (typo in url fixed) by
Dr. Steven Mizrach, adjunct professor of sociology/anthropology at Florida
International
University
who earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Florida. His tone
is measured, and this essay begins, "It has been seven years since
I wrote my first article on the Priory of Sion/Rennes-les-Chateau mystery." This
might be a good place to start. You could spend a weekend tracking down
the names and incidents he mentions. (The town of Rennes-le-Château,
at right, is the site of the church of Mary Magdalen.)
Codex
Bezae and the Da Vinci Code: A textcritical look at the Rennes-le-Chateau
hoax offers both "pro-mystery" and "contra" links
priory-of-sion.com aims
to debunk, announcing that it "provides the salient facts about both
the Priory of Sion and Rennes-le-Château."
The problem with the sites above is that they do assume you already know what
they're talking about. If you don't, the International
Knights Templar site is full of information about the Templars now and then including this
page that lays out the Da Vinci Code story in a more introductory way.
If you've never been near any of this, Dan Brown's plot
summary will at last get you on the same page with some of these authors.
Debunking fiction seems a thankless task.
Link
to this item | Comment
The
cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere: JD Lasica's
latest is up at OJR. Viral marketing, people paid to mention products or
sponsors, people given products to write about and keep, schwag of all
sorts. (Wait till they discover travel junkets.) Good stuff.
Link
to this item | Comment
Bill
Maher: Kids Say the Darndest, Most Stalinist Things: In the L.A.
Times,
A new survey found that a majority of high schoolers think newspapers should
not be allowed to publish without government approval. And almost one in
five said that Americans should be prohibited from expressing unpopular opinions.
Lemme tell you little darlings something: This is my livelihood you're messing
with, so either learn the Bill of Rights or you don't deserve Social Security....
...But the younger generation is supposed to rage against the machine, not
for it; they're supposed to question authority, not question those who question
authority.
Maher's new season on HBO starts tonight at 11.
Link
to this item | Comment
Lawrence
H. Summers: Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering
Workforce. Harvard has released the transcript of its president's controversial
Jan. 14 speech. Here's what he says it's about:
I'm going to confine myself to addressing one portion of the problem (of
diversity), or of the challenge we're discussing, which is the issue
of women's representation in tenured positions in science and engineering
at top universities and research institutions, not because that's necessarily
the most important problem or the most interesting problem, but because
it's the only one of these problems that I've made an effort to think in
a very serious way about.
Link
to this item | Comment
Whose news, how much and why? Jeff Pelline is editor
of CNET News.com. writes (Newspapers'
Net correction) that he left "a steady newspaper job (at the San
Francisco Chronicle) nine years ago to help launch this online news site..." Now
he's volunteered to be the welcoming committee.
Despite the opportunity to make their businesses more profitable, the brass
worried about cannibalizing their own print model. Although many companies
invested in the Internet, it definitely was a sidelight business. ("I
work for the print edition, not the online edition," was the typical
refrain from many longtime journalists.)
Now the print media giants are changing their tune--albeit it more from
a defensive than offensive posture. Stuck with stagnant growth and under
pressure from Wall Street, these companies are taking their biggest plunge
yet into the Internet pool.
In the latest example, The New York Times Co. said Thursday it will buy
online information portal About.com for $410 million from publisher Primedia.
Most of the news and blogger buzz is focusing on the ad side of the About.com
acquisition. I think the real genius here is how many nich subjects are lovingly
tended there by passionately involved and knowledgeable humans -- more than
500 experts on everything from ADD
to Zoology. 500 new sections in one fell swoop.
About.com "guides," after orientation, see some compensation:
• Guide compensation is based on page views. Each Guide is assigned
a unique page view rate for each thousand page views the site gets each a
month. In addition to the page view rate, there are also incentives for growing
traffic.
• No matter what their page view rate is, Guides get paid a minimum of
$500 for their first full-month on the network and are guaranteed at least $500
as long as they increase page views each month.
Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post, Steven
Pearlstein seems to ignore all these developments -- the word blog doesn't
appear in this column -- predicting that,
In the future, readers and viewers will be able to get only the news and
features they really want at a price they are willing to pay for them.
For those who are satisfied with a quick overview of the news, and easily
accessible data on everything from bowling scores to stock prices, they'll
find it free in newspapers and Web sites and TV channels supported by advertisers
seeking large audiences and low costs per reader for reaching them.
And those who need or want the most comprehensive and sophisticated kind
of news products, in print or video, will have to spend a dollar a day or
more to get a customized package delivered to their homes or made available
through their computers or cable modems.
EPIC 2014 is
the answer to this.
Related: Earlier this week, I Want Media published a speech Vanity
Fair media columnist Michael Wolff gave to the 2005 SIIA Information Industry
Summit in New York headlined, 'Free
Information is Now the Topic in the Media Industry.
Wolff's speech isn't there any more. FishbowNY,
a Media Bistro site,
reports,
If you're wondering what happened to last week's IWantMedia article wherein
Michael Wolff reportedly said that Wall Street Journal stopped mattering
when it started charging for its website, we have an answer: IWantMedia took
it down under pressure from Wolff.
Wolff, reached via email, tells Fishbowl, "It wasn't an interview.
It was a talk I gave that somebody recorded and then transcribed. Beyond
being purloined, it was poorly transcribed, unedited, and not meant to be
a piece of written work, so I asked that it not be published."
Bells can't be unrung. We know what he said.
Link
to this item | Comment
Weekend links:
Seeing
Shadows: Words Against Empire from Winter in the Kingdom. By Douglas
Haynes at Orion. Nicely
written. Haynes mentions the moon looking like a paint color called Touch
of Nectar. I found it here. Thanks to Eric Lilius for the link.
Google
Help:Cheat Sheet. You may not have known you could focus your search
in some of these ways.
Baby
name voyager: See when your name was possible. It's true: Nobody's
named Marguerite any more.
Link
to this item | Comment
February 17, 2005, 7:21 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
 |
 |
|
|
|
| The
Nautilus, top
left, won First Place and Artist's Choice for Team Tennessee; an actual
nautilus
shell is below it.
At top
right, Stan
Wagon's Team Minnesota executed Carlo
H. Séquin's design, Knot Divided, based
on a Möbius strip. A drawing of such a strip with a single
twist is at right. |
Splitting a
triply twisted Möbius strip down the middle yields a single, twisted
loop tied into a trefoil knot. It's a symbol
of immortality. |
 |
2005
International Snow Sculpture Contest photos: Designs based on the
Fibonacci Curve and the Möbius strip were among the winners of this
year's attempts to turn a 20-ton block of snow into art in Breckenridge,
Colo. hisels,
saws, chicken wire and carrot scrapers.
Summit
Daily news reports, "Teams used chisels, saws, chicken wire and carrot
scrapers but no power tools to carve the snow."
Thumbnails of all the winners at the headline link can be clicked for larger
views, with some much larger, different
views -- here.
People's Choice, Kids' Choice and Honorable Mention awards
went to Team China for Butterfly Lovers, above, based on a
legend of lovers
who were reborn as butterflies after they died for love. (I've increased
the contrast to show
the surface detail.)
(Both Science
Mysteries -- with photos of flower and of the nautilus shell the sculptors
made of snow -- and
Fibonacci Numbers
and how they are related to flowers, pine cones,
pineapples, palm trees, suspension bridges, spider
webs,
dripping taps, CDs, your savings account,
and quite a few other things
make this fundamental mathematical concept that underlies
much of nature easy to grasp.)
Knot
Divided's designer, Carlo H. Séquin, thoroughly
documentsthe design and
creation process, noting, "No
medal
--
mostly because '...
of some visible flaws of execution and the lack of an explicit emotional message.' " Ivars
Peterson's MathTrek explores more Knot
Divided's underpinnings.
Link
to this item | Comment
Philadelphia
Hopes to Lead the Charge to Wireless Future is a fascinating Times story
about 4,000 wireless antenna making Philadelphia
"one gigantic wireless hot spot, offering every neighborhood high-speed access
to the Web
at below-market prices in what would be the largest experiment in municipal
Internet service in the country."
As long as you stay outdoors. Most interesting:
In West Philadelphia, the People's Emergency Center, a nonprofit group, is
already providing such services, including after-school computer programs,
wireless access at $5 a month, Web site development for small businesses and
a program that helps welfare recipients communicate with caseworkers through
the Internet. The group also sells refurbished computers to eligible residents
for $125.
Couldn't we do this here? MuniWireless has
dozens of stories about the more than 50 hot
cities the Times mentions, community
wireless and much more. What would it take to start a movement here?
Link
to this item | Comment
Conjunction junction: After he learned I had quoted him as part of
last
week's item on the death of playwright Arthur Miller, blogger
Clifford Garstang emailed to ask how I'd found him. (Technorati).
What
began
as my editor's eye knowing a good voice when I read it ended up at Flood,
1978 a
short
story Clifford wrote. Aftr a few paragraphs I was totally there, in that scene
with those people, despite the distractions of a busy newsroom.
Flood, 1978 was published in Circle
Magazine, the sort of little
arts zine that spread the work of Emerson and Eliot (in
different eras) in The
Dial (the names at this link to its 1920s contents became the canon),
and the
Beats. (You'll find many more contemporary versions of these pubs online
in these lists.)
You can keep the outraged, easily offended bloggers. I'm on a hunt for the
quieter voices, fraught with substance and a good story to tell.
If you want a chronological blow-by-blow, hire a transcriptionist. Whether
it's covering a -con (geekspeak for a convention) or writing about running
for cover, it takes
something
entirely other to craft a story people will actually want to read. After Clifford
Garstang's good work on Miller, quick blog post that it was, it's no surprise
that there's more there. It showed.
I'm glad he wrote both, and that I found them.
And yes, a voice can come in through the eye.
Link
to this item | Comment
Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself is the title
of a Wallace
Stevens poem. It's what popped to mind reading this Times story
with the impossible headline, Between
Truth and Lies, An Unprintable Ubiquity. Here's how it starts,
Harry G. Frankfurt, 76, is a moral philosopher of international reputation
and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is also the author of a book recently
published by the Princeton University Press that is the first in the publishing
house's distinguished history to carry a title most newspapers, including
this one, would find unfit to print. The work is called "On Bull - -
- - ."
The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition,
repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:
"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so
much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we
tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of
their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the
phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained
inquiry."...
I can imagine the discussions of how to render the word. I've been in such
a discussion, after I blogged a Doc Searls quote containing the same word without
actually seeing it as I would have when I worked on the print side.
A day after I blogged it I was told it it had to be altered.
Here, it picked up asterisks rather than brackets as its fig leaf. (I can't
find it to link to it because Google refuses to see the asterisks.)
What the Times adds to this is an interview with Mr. Frankfurt and the wonderful
line,
"I used the title I did," he added, "because I wanted to
talk about [bull] without any [bull], so I didn't use 'humbug' or 'bunkum.' "
(Frankfurt probably didn't exactly say he wanted to talk about "[bull]."
What is the sound of spoken brackets?)
What the Times fails to add is a link
to the Thing Itself.
The
book's page at Princeton University Press has clips
of a video interview with Frankfurt.
Link
to this item | Comment
February 16, 2005, 8:04 p.m.
The
Outlaws & Scalawags Songbook: "Songs about villains, assassins,
hoboes, bad boys, badder girls and other folks you wouldn't want to bring
home to meet mom arranged for frailing banjo."
Link
to this item | Comment
Christo's Gates are shiny strings of beads in satellite image of
Central Park: This photo is huge, so there's a treasure hunt involved
even in seeing the saffron, but it's a fascinating view. I didn't know there
were so many
baseball fields in the park.
(It's not for the bandwidth-challenged.)
Link
to this item | Comment
A savant who can explain his process: From the Guardian (A
genius explains), Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant. His right brain
seems to do left-brain tasks:
Daniel Tammet is talking. As he talks, he studies my shirt and counts the
stitches. Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit,
Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical
genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall
pi to 22,514 decimal places. He also happens to be autistic, which is why
he can't drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left. He lives with
extraordinary ability and disability.
Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn't "calculating":
there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer
instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes,
colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five
is a clap
of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The
image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the
answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think."...
...Last year Tammet broke the European record for recalling pi, the mathematical
constant, to the furthest decimal point. He found it easy, he says, because
he didn't even have to "think". To him, pi isn't an abstract set
of digits; it's a visual story, a film projected in front of his eyes. He
learnt the number forwards and backwards and, last year, spent five hours
recalling
it in front of an adjudicator. He wanted to prove a point. "I memorised
pi to 22,514 decimal places, and I am technically disabled. I just wanted
to show people that disability needn't get in the way."...
In a small way, I understand a bit of this. I've always been able to spell
very well. And the word does float up on my inner screen and I read it off.
It must be puny version of his extraordinary process.
Link
to this item | Comment
IE
7 to come: Only for XP users, a beta this summer, according to
Microsoft's IEBlog.
MozillaZine reports
it with lots of links. (And comments.) (This user
of the open-source Mozilla/Firefox family shrugs.)
Link
to this item | Comment
DVD
movie jukebox: J.D. Lasica's latest interview with a tech CEO focuses
on Michael Malcolm, CEO and founder of
Kaleidescape. Here's how JD summed it up in email:
An industry cartel is
suing a tech startup because it had the temerity of
creating
a device
where
you
can
store your
DVDs
without having
to have the physical DVDs present in the device while you're watching a movie.
Another important chapter in the digital rights wars that has attracted almost
zero coverage in the media until now.
Link
to this item | Comment
Ceremonies
mark 2-year fire anniversary: More events commemorating The Station
nightclub fire, from today's Journal. Coming up quick, a concert Thursday night:
Nocturnal Sun, Beyond
Blonde, Heather Rose, Delphine, Satyr (of Slugworth), Japonica, Dan
Pepin (of Let Down) and The Jena
Campaign, rock, Cats, 530 Broadway, Pawtucket. 722-0150. 8 pm-1 am.
$5. Benefit for The Station Fire Memorial.
(The links are to the local bands' pages on our mp3 site, where you can hear
their music.)
Link
to this item | Comment
Name
that woman: Monday, I misidentified the woman in the
photo singing
with Don Ho during the Pro Bowl halftime show as American Idol finalist
Jasmine Trias, and a reader known only as Brien let me know about it. Trias
did sing
with
Ho but,
as you
can
see
at right, she wasn't wearing orange. No one seems to know who the woman in
orange is.
I emailed the photo editor of The Honolulu Advertiser to ask if any of
his local photographers had shot her and knew her name, but they didn't.
Do you know her name? Please let
me know, and let me know how you know who
she is, and minor glory will come your way.
Link
to this item | Comment
February 15, 2005, 7:32 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Great
Backyard Bird Count runs Friday through Monday: It's the eighth
annual census, and "No bird left behind" is its rallying cry.
Bird blog 10,000
birds has
the sweetener:
This event, developed and managed by the Cornell
Lab of Ornithology in conjunction with the National
Audubon Society is a celebration of the symbiosis enjoyed by backyard
feeder-watchers and the birds they watch feed. During the Great Backyard
Bird Count, people across North America are invited to count the birds
in their backyards (or out their windows, in local parks, or even at wildlife
refuges) and report their sightings over the Internet.
Of course, to get the most out of this event, you'll want to attract a diverse
array of birds to your backyard. It's no trick at all to get starlings and
house sparrows to eat seed off your stoop. Backyard birding is a much richer
experience when multifarious species avail themselves of your hospitality.
Remember that variety draws variety. If you want lots of backyard birds,
you'll need the right seed for the job....
Link
to this item | Comment
Make your backyard a wildlife habitat: Although this
program has been underway since 1973, I only learned of it last week from Jane
Blumenthal, a northern Virginia gardener and garden blogger, who wrote to ask
that I add her "gardening/backyard habitat/native plant blog," Wrenaissance
Blog, to the Garden Blogs list.
Her site, Wrenaissance.com,
notes that her yard is a National Wildlife Foundation Backyard
Wildlife Habitat. It's also an Urban
Wildlife Sanctuary (that's a program run by the Humane Society).
With
many New Englanders trying to escape late winter by poring over seed catalogs
and online sites, these are interesting spinoffs to explore. Wrenaissance has
pages of Jane's photos of native
plants, wildlife,
a really nice bird FAQ and
more. It's a great site.
I asked this habitat host a few questions about creating one in our backyards,
including "May cat-owners participate?" and here's what she wrote:
Any size yard can be a habitat - I've even heard of people creating them
on apartment balconies....
The cat question is a very emotional one, on both sides. There's no formal
requirement about cats in the program, just to provide the four elements
of a habitat. (food,
water, cover and places for wildlife to raise their young) My personal
way of looking at this is to ask whether the birds are better off if you
create a habitat in your yard with the cats, or if you don't. You're going
to have the cats regardless, so it seems to me that it's a net gain to make
the yard more bird-friendly. The more habitats the better
Every year we try to tell the birds about the cats, and tell the cats they
can be friends with the birds. We only lose two or three birds a summer...
Link
to this item | Comment
A tweak makes new Napster more like old Napster: A
techie figures out a workaround that changes DRM-protected WMA files to DRM-free
WAVs..
Here's how Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing words
it:
Turning Napster's 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free
music
"
Marv on record" provides the how to on some "Theoretical fun" for
legally getting hundreds of Napster music CDs for the price of the blank
CDs. Link
Be sure to read the comments on Marv's post for good explanations of the
loophole.
Link
to this item | Comment
Michael
Wolff: 'Free Information is Now the Topic in the Media Industry:
The Vanity Fair media columnist argues that the Wall Street Journal "stopped
mattering" when it locked up its editorial content behind a pay-subscription
wall. Also, blogs "lower the value of all information." (This
url doesn't work any more; here's
why)
This is a speech transcript, so it's rambling, and some thoughts don't get
finished. A few questions from the audience at the end try to pin him down
more, with only modest success. Here are some bits of it:
...the music business is interesting because it really maintained two models.
It maintained this free ubiquity model: music was everywhere, you didn't
have to pay for it, it felt like your birthright. At the same time, you did
have
to pay for it. I mean, if you wanted to hold it in your hand then you had
to pay for it. So that was the model. And then along came the technological
wherewithal
to take it. So all of a sudden people have this ability to take what they
believe they own. And the music business tried to make everyone out to be
thieves.
But nobody bought that because the industry had effectively already given
away the product, and there was just now this technological solution to taking
actual
possession of it.
And,
The music business was never really the media business before. It was the
information business. It was just selling units.
Now there is this new conception of the music business, which is a perfect
media conception. We can't monetize our product by selling information, but
we can bring an audience together, and we can partner with you and your marketing
needs. This is the media business. And they have all kinds of plans for doing
this, which are all more or less cockamamie. But they are nevertheless a vision
of music as media.
And,
The ecology of information has been disrupted because there is so much information
that nobody has authority. So if you're in the information business what
you have been customarily selling is authority: "We know. We have information." Nobody
believes that you have information anymore. Nobody believes your information
should not be qualified by other information.
What interests me here is that he gives no answers. It's as though he hasn't
thought it through all the way, either, but he's tossing out ideas for you
to think about, react to.
Link
to this item | Comment
Art in Cities needs
Providence photos: There are photos of art made in Rostov-on-Don, Ho Chi Minh
City, even Joinville, Brazil -- but none from Providence. You know you can
fix that.
Link
to this item | Comment
The Gates: Central Park in saffron. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's site
about the project, and
a blog devoted
entirely to the work.
Link
to this item | Comment
Classic cat:
...is a directory with links to over 1500 free to download classical performances
on the internet, sorted by composer and work. To find the classical music
you select a composer, a work and a performing musician. Then you are transported
to the page of the musician(s) where the music is hosted and you can download
it.
Link
to this item | Comment
The Station fire second anniversary memorial service Sunday: Feb.
20 is the second anniversary of the
fire that killed 100 people after pyrotechnics
ignited the West Warwick nightclub at the beginning of a concert by Great
White. A 4:30 p.m. service organized by the Station
Fire Memorial Foundation is expected to last an hour.
Parking will not be permitted at the memorial site, with the exception of
limited handicapped parking. Free parking will be available in the lower lot
of the
West Warwick
Civic Center on
Factory
Street and buses
will provide transportation to and from the site starting at 3:30
p.m.
The last
bus will leave
at 7 p.m.
Link
to this item | Comment
The Global Consciousness
Project at Princeton.
February 15, 2005, 7:17 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
 |
| Winning
news photos: Austrian photographer Alfred Seiland's photo "Hanging
gardens" -- those are dresses hanging from a treetop clothesline
-- published in the N.Y. Times Magazine, placed second in the Arts
and Entertainment division of the 2004 World
Press Photo contest. While the winning news photos tend to
violence, and the sports to abstracted bodies, the extraordinary
images of life, people and nature are hidden "below the fold" (be
sure to pull down the scroll bar on the right side of the thumbnail
page of winners). |
Link
to this item | Comment
Actions, not words, apparently led CNN's Jordan to
resign: In a story headlined CNN
executive quits over remarks, Howard Kurtz of the The Washington Post
tells some of us... (i.e., he left our the last paragraph below for space
reasons in the print edition of the Post, according
to Slate's Mickey Kaus):
WASHINGTON — CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, resigned
last night in an effort to quell a bubbling controversy over his remarks
about U.S. soldiers killing journalists in Iraq.
No definitive account of what Jordan said at the World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 27 has been made public....
...Several CNN staffers say Jordan, who was distraught about the controversy,
saw the handwriting on the wall in tendering his resignation. But top executives
are also said to have lost patience with the continuing gossip about Jordan,
including his
affair with Marianne Pearl, widow of the murdered reporter Daniel
Pearl, and subsequent marital breakup....
Jordan's memo
to his colleagues said, "After 23 years at CNN, I have decided
to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by
the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding
the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq."
Jordan had been married 16 years and has two children.
Link
to this item | Comment
Bloggers
from hell --or heavensent? is a stylish rant by the Chicago Tribune's
Charlie Madigan that includes this Jordan moment:,
Maybe CNN was going to get rid of the guy anyhow and the bloggers just
came along and provided the beard for the dismemberment.
But, as he wanders from yellow journalism to UPI to Dan Rather and Charles
and Camilla, most of it is funnier than that, such as the line,
We have barely had the time to grow a real nice navel here in the blogging
world, and we're already gazing at it.
In the end, here's the sage moment:
People who are marketing ideology as truth will eventually go the way
of the pamphleteers, I suspect.
What will be left are the people who market truth as ideology.
You want to blog, make that your ideal.
Right on, brother.
Link
to this item | Comment
 |
AP
Jasmine Trias and Hawaiian singer Don Ho performs
during halftime at the Pro Bowl Sunday. |
Adams
misses Pro Bowl when his gear never arrives: That's Dallas offensive
tackle Flozell Adams, according to AP:
...because of an unexplained mixup between Dallas and Honolulu, Adams
didn't have his Cowboys helmet, shoulder pads and other gear. He tried
on several other helmets, but didn't feel comfortable in them.
Did anybody else think of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, here? Or that
what he wore might just not matter that much that day?
The Pro Bowl was perhaps the ESPN crew's low point. They did live feature
interviews during the game, including one where the last live shot was of
the Patriots' Tedy Bruschi recovering a NFC fumble. The next live shot was
the NFC snapping the ball again. Sometime later they told us a penalty had
invalidated the entire play.
Misidentifying players was common, but we can't really fault them for that.
Players were allowed to wear their own team numbers, and there were five
players wearing 20. Only the helmets distinguished one from another.
What was really troubling was that they seemed to have forgotten about us,
the viewers, who were trying to watch the last football game of the season.
They talked over the action without reporting it, barely offered instant
replays, had camera problems with shadows that plunged the action into darkness
while the fans in the sunlit stands were overexposed and, maddeningly, interviewed
players while the action went unseen behind them.
Philly's Donovan McNabb and the Pats' Tom Brady were inconsequential. Brady
looked exhausted and out of place in a red AFC uniform. He threw an interception
(to Philadelphia's Lito Sheppard, a week after it would have mattereed),
and Adam Vinatieri actually missed a 41-yeard field goal. But these were
the guys with nothing to prove.
A rested Peyton Manning wrenched the spotlight back on himself with three
touchdown passes in the first half. (He was being interviewed during the
Bruschi recovery, and had actually paused to watch the play at that point.
He had to be hauled back into the interview.)
For all the hype about how this doesn't count, accompanied by a halftime
show that didn't either -- 74- year-old Don Ho sang his 1967 hit Tiny
Bubbles with American Idol finalist Jasmine Trias and fans blew
some -- several players, including Atlanta quarterback Michael Vick and the
San Diego Chargers' Drew Brees, showcased their talents. Even the Pats' Larry
Izzo shone in a trick play early in the game. He took a direct snap in punt
formation and snaked with the ball 27 yards for a first down.
Had Vick been able to pull off a win in his second-half performance, he
would have snagged the MVP honor that went almost by default to Manning.
But the 17 points Vick supervised weren't enough. The game ended with the
AFC breaking the 17-17 series tie with a 38-27 victory.
Link
to this item | Comment
Priory
Of Sion: The Facts, The Theories, The Mystery
