Subterranean Homepage News

Fair and balanced, too!

Sorry, illness in the family canceled the Friday blog.

November 25, 2003 7:44 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Thanksgiving dinner's at my house, so I'm off tomorrow to shop and clean and bake. See you Friday. Happy Thanksgiving to you all -- and thank you for coming by to read my blog. I can feel you out there. I hope to have comments enabled early in the year, and then you'll be visible here, too.

Gregg Easterbrook is back -- at NFL.com: The headline is Tuesday Morning Quarterback: Week 13, but it's not on ESPN.com, nor on footballoutsiders.com. If you missed the whole tedious flap that got him disinvited, the Buffalo News has the scoop on Easterbrook's fall and resurrection.

Easterbrook is on NFL.com, and will offer TV commentary on the NFL Network (the one that doesn't have any games).

In his explanations of why he calls which team what -- Easterbrook uses the word cognomen, but to you and me they're nicknames -- here's the Patriots part:

The New England Flying Elvii. The Patriots themselves call their new logo the Flying Elvis, and Elvii makes it plural. Some readers counter that if Latin, the third declension of Elvis would be Elves, while if Greek, the plural would be Elvides.

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A 21st century Whole Earth Catalog? From Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing:

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools -- the book
Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired and the former editor of Whole Earth Magazine, has self-published my favorite book for 2003: a 140-page color book with reviews of his favorite "gadgets, how-to books, amazing documentaries, great pieces of software, uncommon mail order catalogs, websites, pieces of machinery, and things you can grab with your hand." If you've seen the old Whole Earth Catalogs, then you already have a good idea of what Cool Tools is like. No matter how much you already know, you'll find dozens of things in here to blow your mind. Hurry, because Kevin only printed 250 copies. They cost $20 at Amazon.com Link

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Compromise Puts TV Ownership Cap at 39%: Last night, while news organizations were chasing Glen Campbell's arrest for DUI and assault, the revolt against the FCC's expansion of the cap on the number of TV stations a network could own fizzled.

The Washington Post reports that the FCC had intended to "allow television networks to buy more stations, expanding a network's potential national audience from 35 percent of all viewers to 45 percent."

"...Congressional negotiators agreed to a 39 percent cap. In real terms, this means ABC and NBC will be able to buy a few more television stations. CBS (owned by Viacom) and Fox, already reaching about 39 percent of the national audience, will not."

Perhaps we'd rather chuckle at reports that Campbell was heard singing Rhinestone Cowboy in his jail cell than face the apparent reality that there's nothing we can do about most of what's just been passed in Washington, from a confusing Medicare bill that all of Rhode Island's senators and congressmen voted against, to new overtime rules that target middle-class wage earners (blogged here yesterday), to a compromise on FCC rules that drew strong opposition from almost everybody but big media.

Tom Mangan quotes a story from former U.S. Senator Paul Simon (remember the bow ties?); this is Simon's mentor speaking, Sen. Paul Douglas:

"Paul," he said, "if you want to stay in public office you have to get media attention. The substantial things you do generally will not get attention unless they are involved in a major controversy. The media loves trivia. You have to do a certain amount of that to stay alive politically.

You want star trivia, salacious gossip, guess-who's-boffing-who? Here ya go: The mother of all Hollywood gossip sites, Blind Item Rehash. Derived from the "best" of the newsgroup alt.gossip.celebrities, it speaks to Douglas's trivia theory as it applies to Hollywood.

After you've wallowed awhile, you may be ready for something like Wired's long, fascinating story The Key to Genius.
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Yule Heibel welcomed me to her blogroll with a Smiths' song, Sheila Take a Bow:

Sheila take a, Sheila take a bow
Boot the grime of this world in the crotch, dear
And don't go home tonight
Come out and find the one that you love and who loves you
The one that you love and who loves you

The Smiths's song for Sheila: appropriately to the point: keep booting the grime of this world in the crotch!

That's one of the best street definitions of journalism I've ever read.

I needed that -- especially after discovering my permalinks had been locked away behind the registration wall for who knows how long. It was more than nice to know that someone who couldn't link to my posts still wanted simply to read and recommend them.

Yule's smart blogs serves up lots of food for thought. From Did you see/ do this?,

Did you read Christopher Caldwell's review of Martin Amis's new book, Yellow Dog? According to the reviewer here, Amis takes pornography apart by being pornographic himself. And while I'm not sure I want to read Yellow Dog, it's probably recommended reading for any who think porn is just one more "cool," "free," "freaky -- loosen up!" consumer item. From the review:...

And eventually quotes Amis's book:

He knew that the distance between himself and the world of women was getting greater. Each night, as he entered the Borgesian metropolis of electronic pornography—with its infinities, its immortalities—Clint was, in a sense, travelling towards women. But he was also travelling away from them.

We know this intuitively, don't we?

Discovering Yule after she discovers me, I also discover I'm among fine company on her blogroll -- some old friends, some unfamiliar new names to explore.
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Ye Olde Phart, Patrick Blake, is back. He emails, "Haven't had as much fun since I worked as a cub reporter at the Calgary Herald fifty years ago."
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Play "Stump the dictionary!": There's a buzz about the OneLook Reverse Dictionary, which " lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept."

Off the top of my head, I shot it "knowing what's going to happen." When one of the results was "dreadlocks," I knew it was twirling in circles, shooting steam out its little ears, and bluffing.
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Mona Gobbla and more: In case you missed it last week, we're running a Photoshop contest here to Dress the Turkey. The image at right is an entry by Mike Brodeur of Warwick, R.I.

Download one of our turkey photos below (click to enlarge them), or find your own, then use Photoshop or another graphics or paint program to add a background and embellish that bird. The prize is a selection from our books editors stash of pricey coffee-table books. You have through Sunday to enter, as many times as you like.

Upload your entry by Nov. 30. / View the entries (reg req) or email your entry to me.
Winner will be announced here on Dec. 1.

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November 24, 2003 8:48 p.m.

Unfortunately, the facts are hard to come by. The AP story by Alan Fram says,

Critics of the new rules said they could lead to 8 million Americans losing eligibility for overtime pay, largely white-collar workers earning more than $65,000 a year. Administration officials say more than 644,000 such employees would lose the time-and-a-half pay now required when they work more than 40 hours in a week.

But a story at Workday Minnesota says,

Washington, D.C. — WASHINGTON – Congressional leaders ignored votes in both the House and Senate and instead cleared the way Nov. 21 for President George W. Bush to strip overtime pay from 8 million workers who now receive it.

... The rules guarantee overtime eligibility for low-wage workers, but make it easier for employers to reclassify any worker who makes at least $425 a week as supervisory, professional or administrative in order to deny them overtime pay. The Senate had inserted language blocking Bush’s overtime plan on Sept. 10, and the House instructed its negotiators to go along on Oct. 2. However, conference committee members ignored those votes and caved in to the president before Congress adjourned for Thanksgiving. Bush has threatened to veto the entire appropriations bill if it blocks his overtime changes.

There's a link to the AFL-CIO website, but the url for "Learn more about the Bush administration’s proposed changes to overtime pay regulations" was bad. (I saw the problem, hacked the URL and found the story; that URL is correct now.) Here's the breakdown:

Under the Bush overtime scheme:

* Millions of salaried workers making between $22,101 and $65,000 who now are eligible to receive overtime pay could be reclassified as executives or administrative or professional employees—and would no longer qualify for overtime pay.
* Relatively low-salary earners who have supervisory responsibilities or management-related responsibilities would be penalized, as would workers with advanced education or specialized training. Some of the jobs affected are police, firefighters, nurses, retail managers, insurance claims adjusters and medical therapists.
* Employees not covered by the new rules also could be hurt: By reclassifying many of their workers as exempt from overtime pay, employers most likely would assign overtime only to them and eliminate overtime for other workers. Police and firefighters are among those potentially affected.
* Anyone making $65,000 or more a year likely would lose overtime pay, effectively eliminating many middle-income wage earners’ much-needed extra pay.

The good news is that lower income workers, such as fast-food managers, will now be eligible for overtime. But many middle-class workers -- including police and firefighters and journalists -- can more easily be reclassified as "professionals" if they make over $22,101. If they are covered by a union contract, of course, the contract applies, not the new rules.

Online, nurses react. There are links to more coverage at nursingadvocacy.org.

PBS's Online Newshour examined the proposed rules in September.

Just in time for Christmas.
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How to Get Fired Because of Your Blog: Jeneane Sessum offers a rebuttal of Blogger software's How Not To Get Fired Because of Your Blog. It's grounded in reality.

... These days, many companies are laying off employees by the hundreds, even thousands. You don't have any job security, even if you think you do, so what difference does it make if you blog at work? The fact is, you'll probably be let go next week anyway, so don't give away your intellectual property (your blog and what you know about blogging) with the illusion that anyone at your company will care. Once you've given them a ten-word definition of blogging, that's all they'll need to sound smart at lunch, on the golf course, and at that next emerging technology conference.

... If you think your blogging will make you a star at work, start looking at your company's severance policy today!

In fact, getting fired because of your blog is one of the smartest marketing moves you can make. Straight to the top of Daypop, Technorati -- hey, Andrew Sullivan will probably shoot you a link. That's right. You can be out from under your boss's thumb and working for the coolest new startup, or even the Dean campaign, tomorrow. If you play your cards right. ...

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Paper copies required on vote devices: From the San Jose Mercury News,

In a decision already drawing fire and praise, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley announced Friday that all electronic voting machines in California must be able to print a paper copy of each ballot by 2006.

Combined with stricter requirements for testing and auditing the machines and the software used to run them, Shelley said the steps will help give voters ``confidence that every vote cast is a vote counted.''

David Dill, a computer-science professor at Stanford University, predicted that Shelley's decision will affect voters beyond California.

``I think this is going to be a tidal wave from California eastward -- it's going to get a lot of attention and may change a lot of minds,'' Dill told the Associated Press. ``California is the biggest market for election equipment. No company can blow it off, so they're going to have to accommodate this requirement.''

Sequoia Voting Systems, which manufactures touch-screen voting machines used in Santa Clara County, and Diebold Election Systems said they would comply with the new regulations, but that they will cost about $500 more for each machine.

What price accurate, trackable vote counts? Priceless, I'd say.
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Michael Jackson: The accuser's affidavit. Jackson's new site to address the charges.

Bob Schieffer, on CBS's Face the Nation yesterday, offered a sensible take on all this. Here's the top of it:

So they have arrested Michael Jackson. Fine. Give him a fair trial and let me know how it comes out.

Spare me the details between now and then.

I guess I'm going to have to admit it up front. I'm biased. I think Michael Jackson is a creep. I don't want to know anything else about him, about his plastic surgery, about his unhappy childhood, or his friends. I don't want to know. I don't need to know anything else about him.

Just tell me when the jury finds him innocent or guilty.

This in no way is meant as criticism of the news broadcasts and cable shows that have given his arrest such heavy coverage.

When a guy as rich as Michael Jackson goes on trial, you have to keep the pressure on by keeping it in the public eye. When such things don't get public attention, it's too easy for somebody to buy off somebody. ...

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Bill Clinton's 21 favorite books: They're displayed in Little Rock, says AP.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou.
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius.
The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker.
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, Taylor Branch.
Living History, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Lincoln, David Herbert Donald.
The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot.
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison.
The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, David Fromkin.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild.
The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis.
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell.
The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, Carroll Quigley.
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, Reinhold Niebuhr.
The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron.
Politics as a Vocation, Max Weber.
You Can't Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe.
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright.
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, William Butler Yeats.

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Rapunzel of the blogosphere: Rapunzel, in a tale by the Brothers Grimm, was locked in the top of a tower by a wicked witch. The only way to reach her was by climbing her hair... A prince found her, climbed up, got caught ... eventually there's a happy ending.

I discovered, thanks to a comment by Tom Mangan on JD Lasica's blog, that my permalinks and archived blogs had been recently locked away behind the projo registration screen -- only this current page remained on the open Web.

I had seen some strange signs -- few bloggers were linking, Google searches pointed to this page, with the search results only showing in the cached copy of that week's blog -- but I hadn't changed anything, and had had some earlier problems with Google when my blog directory changed.

But today I learned that a recent script, combined with a bug, had "broken" my links, locking them away from unregistered eyes.

At ONA, speaking on a blogging panel, I emphasized "Don't break the net!" Don't lock your bloggers away behind registration.

Hypocrite.

But there's a happy ending. Tom Mangan and JD Lasica, neither of whom I've met, are the blog princes who rescued me. I'm not the swooning type, but just as grateful as Rapunzel for being sprung.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com