| By Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
 September
12, 2003 Updated / 3:15 p.m. -- (Last
week's weblog)
A song before dying: Here's Johnny
Cash's video of Hurt, originally by Nine
Inch Nails, whose website is black today.
After his wife, June Carter Cash, died in May, I wondered if Johnny would
follow soon after.
Goodbye, man. And thanks for a lifetime of your music.
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September
Twelfth: Make 10 people smile today. Blog: Uplift.
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Paul
Krugman: The Buzzflash Interview. The Princeton economics professor
and New York Times columnist is very worried:
I think that with the looming disasters of the budget on foreign policy
–- and the things that really scare me, which I know we're not
going to get into but let's just mention the erosion of civil liberties
at home -– I think that, in retrospect, this will be seen in terms
of how did the country head over this cliff. I hope I'm wrong. If there's
regime change in 2004, and the new man actually manages to steer us
away from the disasters I see in front of us, then we'll probably be
talking a lot about the long boom that was begun during the Clinton
years, and how it was resilient, even to an episode of incredibly bad
management.
But I don't think that's the way it's going to play out, to be honest.
Whatever happens in the election, I think that we've done an extraordinary
amount of damage in the last three years.
And then there's this:
BUZZFLASH: As a professor, if you were giving a lecture and you
had to define the economic policy of the Bush administration, could
you get your arms around it? How would you define it?
KRUGMAN: There is no economic policy. That's really important to say.
The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies
to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted
to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There
really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how
can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do.
Now if you ask what do the people who keep pushing for one tax cut
after another want to accomplish, the answer is they are basically aiming
to create a fiscal crisis which will provide the environment in which
they can basically eliminate the welfare state.
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Sharon
Davis has a blog. If the name means nothing to you, she's Mrs.
Gray Davis, and the blog is called No-Recall.
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Madonna
of the Pseuds: Tom Utley was suddenly conscious that he admired
neither the work of Leonardo nor many other acknowledged masterpieces:
This was an uncomfortable line of thought. It reminded me of all the
hundreds of hours that I had spent in other stately homes, churches
and galleries, cooing admiringly at paintings universally recognised
as masterpieces. How much did I really like them, and how much was I
just pretending, because I knew that it was the Done Thing? Then there
were all those other hours that I had spent in the course of my lifetime,
cultivating my image as a culture vulture. The shameful truth swept
over me that hardly ever had I sat through a play or a concert —
let alone a ballet or an opera — without secretly longing for
it to end. Oh, I would tell my friends afterwards that it had been wonderful,
and that they really must go and see it — particularly if the
reviews were good, and the byline was something highbrow like Chekhov
or Verdi. I would not add that I had spent the last 40 minutes of the
show shifting my weight from one buttock to the other, sweating in the
heat and dying for a pee, glancing furtively at my watch, yearning for
the final curtain and the dash to the pub.
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Weird meme: People are apparently photographing
some reflective items for sale on eBay while they're nude. This is weird
enough, but others are actually noticing the tiny reflections, and one
site is collecting them: Reflectoporn.
(The name is hyperbole, it's pretty safe for work.)
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Where
the “Manchurian Candidate” came from: In the New Yorker.
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September 11, 2003 2:25 p.m.
Not feeling well, leaving early. Just one item today...
The
Guardian of the Web: Daithi O. hAnluain at Online Journalism Review:
The Guardian newspaper in London is the second smallest national daily
broadsheet with a circulation of 369,482. But this modest-sized paper's
online edition, Guardian Unlimited, is the most successful newspaper
site in the UK, attracting 7.5 million unique visitors a month -–
more than 2 million of them from the U.S. and many others from around
the world.
In a long interview, Emily Bell discusses site registration:
OJR: Why do you think you're attracting so many visitors? The
Web site dwarfs what your print publication is doing.
EB: I think it's because we've kept the site free from registration.
I think it's because, in terms of the blogging community and in terms
of Google, you do get linked to. And once you get linked to, you hit
all sorts of maps that help you enormously. And then hopefully -- and
this is where, you know, the sort of alchemy comes in -- when people
pass through your site they will, by osmosis, start to recognize The
Guardian as a brand.
...I think that this is where the argument falls apart, which says,
"If you produce a good enough Web site which puts all your content
on it for free, you will inevitably cannibalize your readership."
If you look at daily newspaper sales in the UK, you'll find that, of
the broadsheets, The Guardian has held its share as steadily as anybody
in the market -- and certainly ahead of The (London) Times.
It is harder to get online (at the Times) now that they've put registration
all over the site. Their circulation has been dropping, while ours has
been holding steady -- and yet our Web traffic has been growing much
faster than either the Times or the Telegraph online.
You could argue on that there is sort of brand reinforcement so that
a strong online presence means interest is stimulated in the offline
product.
And...
OJR: Can you see a day when the paper will be subsumed into
the online operation? When the online newspaper will, to all intents
and purposes, be the newspaper?
EB: Yeah, I do. I'm not saying anything that I've not said privately
before. I think that it is impossible now not to think about five, 10,
15, 20 years hence. There will have been an essential shift in how people
consume written journalism. And it will be a shift to online.
Things will be much more in real time and the newspaper product will
end up being still extremely relevant, but the way that most people
consume it will be online.
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September 10, 2003 7:15 p.m.
Whoopi is smart TV -- and it's on again
Thursday night: I loved Whoopi. And I don't watch much TV.
(Network TV is not for people like me: I generally hate sitcoms.)
Most TV critics didn't like this show, but I think TV critics watch too
much TV. How would they know what will bring people like me back to the
big screen? (The
show's ratings last night were good, perhaps proving that fans like
Whoopi Goldberg more than they like critics.)
It was nice to watch topical humor, a cross between comedians doing
a ensemble skit and All In The Family. But this is All in the
Family with two blacks, an Iranian and a white hiphop chick for a
cast.
The premise is simple: Whoopi plays Mavis Rae, a one-hit wonder singer
who bought a tiny New York hotel with her windfall. She makes Bush jokes,
offending her conservative lawyer brother Courtney (Wren T. Brown), who's
come to visit since he lost his job in the Enron scandal.
 When
the brother, who says black women aren't attracted to him, introduces
his hiphop white girlfriend, Mavis flips out. Not because she's white,
she says, but because "she's 12!" Whoopi said on Today
the other morning that white suburban families are raising black children
these day -- Eminem rules. That's the inspiration for the girlfriend,
Rita (Elizabeth Regen), who thinks Mavis is "da bomb."
The Persian handyman Nasim (Omid Djalili) who blows up if you call him
an Arab is a hoot, making broad jokes that play on Americans' current
fears. (He's not an Arab, remember.)
And, by the end of the show, they're all going to live together in the
hotel.
This loose family works. Everybody's good at something different when
their skills are needed. Sorting it out may be a little ragged.
The writing is politically incorrect and sly. The name of the lounge
in Whoopi's hotel is the Nappy Dugout, a phrase repeated incredulously
several times. The rap
dictionary tells all -- but I wouldn't have
known about it if it weren't for a new
blog by Boston Herald copy editor Marc Levy which columnist and blogger
Cosmo
Macera calls "deep-sounding."
I just hope there are enough of us to keep this show afloat till the
rest of America catches up. Tuesday night at 8 on NBC.
Breaking news: My colleague Lyn Chaput, our TV listings queen,
just told me that NBC is going to rerun the first episode Thursday night
at 9:25, in case you missed it Tuesday night. (Yes, 9:25 is correct. Don't
ask why.)
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The
Falling Man: A meditation on AP photographer Richard Drew's arguably
most famous photo, by Tom Junod at Esquire. (Drew was standing behind
Robert Kennedy when he was killed in Los Angeles in 1968, so this remains
arguable.)
 Do
you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken
pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story
behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our
most intimate connection to the horror of that day.
In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although
he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants
of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be
flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable
in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by
gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his
side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost
casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of
his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the
other pictures, the people who did what he did—who jumped—appear
to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made
puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then
by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off
as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim
down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is
perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings
behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of
him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the
South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he
is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed
entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. ...
The link on the headline above there is in seven parts. Here's the one-page
(printer-friendly
version -- without the photo.
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Senate
Votes to Block New Overtime Rules:
The Senate voted Wednesday to halt the administration's effort to rewrite
decades-old rules on overtime pay, risking a veto showdown with President
Bush and heeding labor's claims that the changes would harm millions
of workers at a time of economic uncertainty.
The 54-45 vote marked a rare defeat for business interests in the GOP-controlled
Congress and left the fate of the emerging Labor Department regulations
unclear. The House backed the new rules this summer, and congressional
negotiators will have to resolve the issue.
"The Bush administration proposal is not only anti-worker and
anti-family, it is bad economic policy," said Democratic Sen. Tom
Harkin of Iowa, who led the assault on the regulations. "It will
take money out of the pockets of hardworking Americans and will not
create one new job."
Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, in a statement, defended the effort as
a bid to "strengthen overtime protections for workers" by
extending overtime eligibility to 1.3 million low earners who now lack
it. "The regulatory process should move forward to benefit workers,"
she said.
Democratic opponents said their plan would not interfere with parts
of the rules extending overtime protection. They took aim at sections
that would strip other workers of eligibility they have long enjoyed.
The precise number was a matter of dispute -- an estimated 800,000 by
administration allies, and as high as 8 million by Harkin's estimate.
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P2P
boss to pay schoolgirl's RIAA bill: The head of peer-to-peer (P2P)
company Grokster (a file-sharing service based in Nevis, West Indies)
has offered to pay the $2,000 settlement the Recording Industry Association
of America (RIAA) has agreed with a 12-year-old girl over her file sharing.
Wayne Rosso, president of P2P software development company Grokster, said
he had made the offer because he was "disgusted" by the RIAA's
tactics. Related: Here's a parody
of the Clean Slate amnesty
affidavit.
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Lefty
rave for FarmAid: At CommonDreams.org,
COLUMBUS, OHIO---The volcano that is Neil Young doing "Down By
the River" was erupting to the roar of a sold-out Farm Aid crowd.
Accompanied by Crazy Horse and Willie Nelson, the patron saint of American
farming, the stage sagged with a psychedelic constellation of rock stars
and native American dancers fully decked in ceremonial garb. Neil was
totally in another world. Rock and roll does not get better than this.
...Now in its eighteenth year, Farm Aid has become a national institution,
working to save the family farm. Originating with the ageless Willie
Nelson, and with Young and John Mellencamp---"our little band of
outlaws," says Nelson---the annual day-long show has become a treasured
icon of vibrant culture and progressive politics for an age in desperate
need.
It has not mellowed with age. As George W. Bush babbled on national
television, demanding billions more to "rebuild" Iraq, Mellencamp
delivered a blistering indictment of an administration defined by death
and pillage. Why are we spending all this money over there, he wondered,
when our own farms are in such tough shape here. Dressed in his signature
blue jeans and a plain white t-shirt, the Indiana-based Mellencamp mixed
a ballad to peace and justice into a strong set built around vintage
rock classics.
No lasers, no gimmicks, no out-of-control egos, the show cruised through
a stellar line-up that balanced a hard-rocking Sheryl Crow with the
ethereal Emmylou Harris, who's lost none of her crystalline beauty through
a quarter-century of stardom. An acoustic set from Dave Mathews shone
alongside a blast from Hootie and the Blowfish. ...
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September 9, 2003 6:50 p.m.
 The
face of music piracy: That's Brianna LaHara, 12, a seventh-grader
at St. Gregory the Great school in Manhattan, sitting at the computer
she uses to download music from Kazaa. Brianna especially likes nursery
songs and TV-show themes, according
to the New York Daily News. The photo is from AP.
The family signed up for the music-swapping service three months ago,
and paid a $29.99 service charge. "If you're paying for it, you're
not stealing it, so what is this all about?" Brianna's mother, Sylvia,
asked.
It's hard to imagine RIAA creating worse poster children for its piracy
vendetta than Brianna and grandfather Durwood Pickle, 71, of Richardson
Tx., the first violator named by AP yesterday.
Wags have run with it to places we've never gone before. The Register
(U.K.) stands out:
The
RIAA sees the face of evil, and it's a 12-year-old girl:
The RIAA has nailed one of the most prolific file-traders in the U.S.,
filing a lawsuit against 12-year-old Brianna LaHara.
When not at the playground with her friends, "Biggie Brianna"
is trading music files from her home in New York. The little girl received
one of the 261 lawsuits filed by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association
of America) on Monday, according to the New York Post. She may look
like a sweet and innocent child, but the RIAA says it's only going after
major copyright violators at the moment. So you make the call.
Related: Senator
Questions RIAA Amnesty Plan: At TechWeb,
Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who has been critical of the Recording
Industry Association of America's (RIAA) tactics in bringing music file
sharing to heel, on Monday warned consumers that signing the RIAA's
amnesty agreement may not be the brightest idea.
... In particular, Coleman took exception to the idea of millions of
minors potentially submitting and signing legal documents that plead
themselves guilty to the RIAA.
“That may not be the best approach to achieving a balance between
protecting copyright laws and punishing those who violate those laws,”
Colema
The Electronic Frontier
Foundation has more, including Why
the RIAA's "Amnesty" Offer is a Sham.
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 Nested
dolls, virtual and not: Jason Sturgill's virtual Wurst
Gallery is open with an exhibit called From
Russia With Love. In June, according to his blog,
he sent blank nested dolls to artists -- and most of the expected 19 sets
are back, painted.
Be sure to click on each doll in the lineup to see th four dolls inside
it -- and then mouse over each size to see its backside. (In "meatspace,"
i.e. the real world, the works are in Portland, Ore.)
The doll at right is the fourth-smallest by Portland artist Trish Grantham.
Very nice idea, very well adapted to the Web. And the originals are all
for sale.
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Another
chance to zero in on Mars: Tom Morgan of the Journal's Northwest
bureau reports (reg.req),
On Thursday, the Audubon Society of Rhode Island will convoy Mars buffs
to the private Skyscrapers Observatory in Scituate via car pooling.
David A. Huestis, historian and ex-president of the amateur astronomy
club, will preside.
"We want to take advantage of the high-powered optics there,"
said Jim Gass, refuge manager at Audubon headquarters on Sanderson Road.
Space is limited to 60 participants, Gass said. Those interested should
reserve a place by calling Audubon headquarters at 949-5454. The cost
is $7 for member adults, $4 for member children, $9 for nonmember adults
and $6 for nonmember children.
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Opus
the Penguin Back In the Funny Business: 'Bloom County' Character
to Star In Berkeley
Breathed's New Strip, says the Washington Post. Look for it in November.
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Glimpses
into the lives of Woodward and Bernstein from the people who know them
well. Miami Herald news researcher Liz
Donovan writes, "Alicia Shepard does the best profile of Woodward
and Bernstein I've read, in Washingtonian. ... for an old Postie like
me, this is fascinating stuff. "
She also points to
this obituary written by Dave Barry for his friend Warron Zevon in
today's Herald.
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 'I
became the profane pervert Arab blogger': The Guardian gets breathless:
It began as an internet joke with a friend in Jordan. But then the
media - including the Guardian - picked it up, and suddenly he was
the Baghdad blogger, the most famous web diarist in the world. Salam
Pax describes what it was like to play cat-and-mouse with Saddam's
censors.
More interesting than that blurb is how he did it:
We also had no access to sites offering free web mail or web
space. You had to use the mail account provided by the ISP and you
can bet your wireless mouse this mail was being monitored. But the
beauty of the internet is that it is not static, it changes all the
time. There are always new sites offering all sorts of services and
the people who run the firewall were not always that clued-up. They
were just as new to this as we were and it was a race. We would use
a certain web mail service until the site was blocked, then start
a new search. You had to be creative with your search terms and have
lots of patience. And for those who were a little bit geekier, the
internet offered a wealth of tunnelling software to download, little
programs which allowed you to make tiny holes in the firewall through
which you could access blocked sites. They knew it was happening.
It was a cat and mouse game.
 Related:
His book is out -- Salam Pax: Baghdad Blog at
Amazon U.K. (It's the photo above.) The Amazon's
U.S. site shows a different cover (at right) and title (Salam Pax:
The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi), and isn't available here
yet, apparently.
Did they think not enough Americans would recognize the word "blog"
to put it in the title?
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How
Old is Your Inner Child: Another silly quiz from Quizilla. (Deep
down, I'm 16, it says.)
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September 8, 2003 6:20 p.m.
Lawyer Milloy undid it all Sunday: Here's Peter
King of SI.com on Lawyer Milloy:
...I think it's a shame he won't be considered a New England icon
when he retires, as he should be. ... Milloy was setting himself up,
through his foundation and through his many charitable works in the
area, to be a big man in New England, a champion forever, long after
he hung up his uniform. Now, as I told him when we spoke on Friday,
he's destined to be regarded -- for right or wrong -- as just another
guy who left town for the money, like Roger Clemens did.
"It's different," Milloy said. "Roger left on his own.
I didn't have a choice. The way I play -- my dependability, my work
ethic -- the fans will remember that always. I don't know how anyone
could ever boo me."
You had a choice, Lawyer. Your dependability, your work ethic, that was
somebody else.
You thought you were sticking it to coach Belichick and the suits who
dissed you with dollars. You
told NBC, "Belichick wants all the credit to go to his game plans.
But you need players. He had a plan for this game. How’d that work
out for him?"
It was about you and him, huh?
Lawyer, yesterday, you stuck it to me and to all the other loyal fans
who'll never see a million bucks in a whole lifetime of pay stubs. All
of us who sat down in front of our TVs yesterday for another heartstopping,
hope-crazed season of Patriots football and watched our broken-hearted
team bleed out on the field.
You didn't see us when you were preening, did you? We saw you. You weren't
a bit reluctant.
You flaunted it, your rich new contract and your new best friend Bledsoe.
You flaunted your entrance -- the last Bill announced. You savored the
sack of your next-door neighbor Tom Brady, just to show Belichick you
could do it. If it weren't for Belichick and Brady, you wouldn't have
that Super Bowl ring, jerk.
Yeah, Lawyer, you're a Bill now. You could have made a commercial and
recouped the money, if you can't live on $3 million a year. And you'd
get another chance to be a New England hero, to lead a new team. "Lawyer
made up all the signals," Ty
Law said.
Now, King is right: You're just another guy who left town for the money.
You bet I'll boo you.
Related: NFL
will look into Milloy tampering allegation, a charge that stems from
another
Peter King story. "Milloy said (his agent, Carl Poston) "called
some teams to see who would want me'' before Tuesday morning, then added:
"The Redskins gave us a bigger offer than the Patriots.'' Poston
now denies this.
Updated/ 9.09 11:06 a.m.
Pundits today are falling all over themselves to make the point that pro
football is a business. I don't cheer for businesses. I don't care whether
one business beats another or not. I don't wear a business's colors or
give fans mugs with a business's logo on it. Are we on the same page yet?
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What Galileo Saw: The New Yorker looks at
what NASA's mission to Jupiter found. And more:
Galileo may still harbor some signs of life on Earth: microorganisms
that have survived since its launch from the Kennedy Space Center, in
Florida, in 1989.
If the orbiter were left to circle Jupiter after running out of propellant
(barring an intervention, this would likely happen within a year), it
might eventually crash into Europa, one of Jupiter’s large moons.
In 1996, Galileo conducted the first of eight close flybys of Europa,
producing breathtaking pictures of its surface, which suggested that
the moon has an immense ocean hidden beneath its frozen crust.
These images have led to vociferous scientific debate about the prospects
for life there; as a result, nasa officials decided that it was necessary
to avoid the possibility of seeding Europa with alien life-forms.
And so the craft has been programmed to commit suicide, guaranteeing
a fiery, spectacular end to one of the most ambitious, tortured, and
revelatory missions in the history of space exploration.
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A
hired gun who muses with fingertips: A Boston Globe profile of
"Mathew Gross, 31, former rock band drummer, Colorado River boatman,
and environmental studies graduate student, (who) became the blogmaster
of the Howard Dean for President operation.
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Doonesbury's
"M" word cartoon -- the strip you may have missed yesterday.
The Sacramento Bee says about 80 percent of the nation's newspapers ran
an alternative strip (including the Journal). The Hartford Courant didn't,
due to a no-censorship policy; neither did the Louisville Courier Journal,
which explains
itself.
Jim
Romenesko collects the links.
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Channel surfing: I landed on C-Span's Washington
Journal just as a caller from California told the
tale from Baghdad
Burning -- by the other Iraqi blogger, a female programmer -- of the
U.S company's $50 million contract for bridge repairs the Iraqi engineers
estimated at $300,000.
The word "blog" was never used, but the story moved to another
medium.
The guest at the time was Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of In
The National Interest, a publication he said was largely funded by
the Nixon Institute, a Washington think tank.
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Sleep
tight, Warren Zevon: Craig's Booknotes collects the essential
stories and photos.
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Sometimes
a photo captures a moment.... The moment just before the crowd
disperses...
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com |
