myxomatosis

NJ Marriage Equality Part 3: The End of Marriage

2012-01-13T00:01:00.000-05:00

This is the third article of a three-part series on gay marriage in New Jersey.

Part 1 gave a broad overview of the state of civil unions and gay marriage in the Garden State. Part 2 focused on polling data, public opinion, and the language used in the gay marriage debate. [In a completely unrelated development, PolitiFact NJ did some research on polling as well, featured in today's Star Ledger. It also published more on Chris Christie's stance.]

Those who have attended Christian wedding services have probably heard the following verse from Saint Paul's first letter to the Corinthians:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things...

...And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
(1 Corinthians 13:4-7, 13)

Is it not wonderful to hear these words and know that God has sanctioned this marriage - that matrimonial love is the outgrowth of a communal and divine love shared by all Christians? Here, within Christianity, love is safe and distinct and clearly exists only between a man and a woman, for Paul rails heartily against homosexuality in Romans 1:26-27!

Yes, truly this is a blessed union, in which male and female unite and female is subordinated to male! Paul reminds us later in First Corinthians:

As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.
(1 Corinthians 14:33-35)

Oh.

Wait a minute. We don't agree with that at all, do we? Hmmm.

The great question: What do we believe? What do we choose to accept among competing scriptural messages?

This is no place for politics.

Ah, but as Noah Feldman points out in Divided by God, the systems are so intertwined! Marriage as recognized by the United States government grew out of the Puritans! They didn't want English clergy performing this...sacrament...so they passed a law that made it illegal for anyone but magistrates to perform marriages. In one fell swoop England and religion were removed from marriage! But people clung to the idea of the "holy." This was a sacred union - commissioned by the government no less!

Marriage serves a very important societal function today. Liberals argue that it confers tax benefits and is essential for the moral practice of such processes as end-of-life care, in which one partner would be best suited to make decisions about the life, well-being, and property of the other. The Religious Right, on the other hand, argues that marriage is a contract between a man, a woman, and God. It's a zero-sum game. If one side wins, the other side loses.

And so I propose a non-zero-sum solution: the abolition of marriage as a governmental institution. Marriage grew out of religion, it's true, but partnership, especially in parenting, is largely perceived as serving a beneficial social function. Therefor marriage should function in the domain - once again - of religion only. Here the Religious Right wins. BUT, in order to provide the benefits promised by a liberal society - those that ensure that the dying are cared for, and that people are rewarded for just behavior - there should still be an institution that mimics marriage. Therefore I propose...

CIVIL UNIONS FOR ALL!

The governmental contract of marriage should be replaced by civil unions, which will remove any semantic confusion about the intermixing of religion and politics on this issue. The term "marriage" muddies the larger question of equal rights - rights supported by a majority of Americans. My proposal does away with that confusion entirely. Homo- and heterosexual partners in civil unions will receive benefits and responsibilities at the state and national level of government. Marriage will recede to its religious roots.

At this point, the Religious Right may grumble something about the government promoting the immoral gay lifestyle, but in fact such legislation would be very beneficial to a moral society, argues David Brooks. The true conservative policy would be to get people to settle down and adhere to societal norms. What better way than to force them into a contractual relationship that would steer them toward the status quo of togetherness!? [Not that heterosexual marriage is doing that well. The divorce rate of the United States is half that of the marriage rate. That means that for every two married people, there is one divorced person!]

Now, there is a slight problem with this. Many religious organizations maintain a special protection to practice discrimination. The Supreme Court in fact recently established a "ministerial exception" to allow churches to hire and fire who they please for certain positions. And while people may argue for changes in the Catholic Church, they aren't doing it through the courts. The separation of church and state in the U.S. is a positive right for religious organizations with a number of legal exemptions.

Religious organizations enjoy a large degree of autonomy, and I don't think this should change. In America, "religion" functions as a marketplace that allows believers to choose a religious "brand." The Pew Research Center reports that 28% of Americans have changed religion from the one they grew up in. Counting shifts in Protestant denominations brings that statistic up to 44%. Some churches already preach a discriminatory message. If you don't like that, you are free to move.

It becomes complex here because believers may discriminate en masse through a religious organization, but may not discriminate as individuals. A wedding photographer (or "civil union photographer" if my idea catches on) may not refuse providing services to gay couples. However, the pastor of the church that the photographer belongs to may refuse to officiate a service for this couple. This brings up an entire new complex of issues, but my instinct now is that as long as religious organizations do not infringe on the rights of others, their actions are legitimate. The very principle of religion's insulation from politics is what allows this somehow-sanctioned discrimination.

Religion speaks to that which they eye does not see and the ear does not hear. It may have ideas to offer to politics, but particular faiths should not bear a great influence in an increasingly pluralistic society. Let us maintain our values - the popular supports for equal rights of all couples - by shifting the way we think about the issue.

[Given the irrational nature of political discourse, I have no faith whatsoever that my proposal would be seriously considered, but I hope I have offered at least a thought-provoking argument. And so, thoughts?]

NJ Marriage Equality Part 2: A Matter of Language

2012-01-11T17:27:00.002-05:00

This is the second article of a three-part series on gay marriage in New Jersey.
Part 1 gave a broad overview of the state of civil unions and gay marriage in the Garden State. Part 3 will focus on moral and religious issues.

It seems that we cannot even speak of the abstract concept of "equality" if we can't get beyond the issue of language.

What's in a Name?
The Star Ledger has begun providing resources to citizens who wish to speak coherently on this issue. (Not that commenters on NJ.com articles take advantage of these resources).

NJ.com [the web arm of the Star Ledger] has focused on State Senate President Stephen Sweeney in one article, noting that the now-advocate for marriage-equality legislation abstained from voting on the same issue two years ago. Oof. That contributed to its demise, even as then-Governor Corzine vowed to approve such a measure. Now the State Congress must muster enough votes to override Governor Chris Christie's all-too-certain veto.

NJ.com even gives a lesson in framing - which informs today's post. The way in which we speak about the issue of marriage equality/same-sex marriage matters because the issue is apparently perceived through a lens constructed by political language.

A fairly-useful infographic accompanied an article that focused on Sweeney [at least in the online version - I don't get the print edition out here in Boston]. The language utilized here attempts balance, but fails to deliver. And I quote:

When Jew Jersey Democrats begin their new effort in the coming weeks to allow same-sex couples to marry, pay close attention to the language both sides choose in framing the debate.

Fair enough, I say. Let's see how both sides use language in framing this:

Proponents can be expected to replace time-worn terms like "gay marriage" and "same-sex marriage" with "marriage equality" - and with good reason. "Marriage equality" has scored 9 percentage points higher among New Jersey voters.

Ah, the politicization of words: tailor your message to your audience. But wait, how does the other side speak about the issue? The JPEG doesn't say. Presumably opponents would favor "homosexual marriage" over "gay marriage," the former having a definite pejorative connotation. "Gay marriage" would probably be used over "same-sex marriage," the latter of which may sound too liberal. "Marriage equality" will be avoided because of its strong support. But I'm just guessing here.

The equality versus same-sex debate says a great deal about public perception of this issue. A rose by any other name, it seems, would indeed be perceived as having a different smell, depending on its name. In the very act of naming this issue we exercise political judgments.

The infographic refers to an August 2011 Rutgers-Eagleton poll that found that support for gay marriage jumped from 52 percent to 61 percent when "gay marriage" was recast as "marriage equality." The truly useful statistic is that 36 percent of the Garden State population opposes same-sex unions of any kind. The rest are either in support or are at the whim of framing. Gay marriage is largely favored when it is perceived as a civil rights issue (that is, one of equality).

What's in a name? An arsenal of political rhetoric. It is deplorable that opinions on this issue hinge not on meaning, but on phrasing.

Taking It to the Polls
Indeed, gay marriage approval in New Jersey is difficult to assess through polling, and many polls wielded as political weaponry when in fact their results are often inconclusive. Public Policy Polling reported on July 29, 2011 that New Jersey residents believe same-sex marriage should be legal, by a margin on 47 percent to 42 percent. Despite the headline that “New Jersey supports legal same-sex marriage, if one were to look at the margin of error of plus/minus 4.5 percentage points, one would see that this assertion is not mathematically reasonable. So, in fact, there can be no conclusion that New Jerseyans favor same-sex marriage based on this poll. Likewise, a November 2009 Quinnipiac University poll found that New Jersey voters opposed legislation allowing same-sex couples to marry, by a margin of 49 to 46 percent. Again, since the margin of error is plus/minus 2.4 percentage points, the assertion that New Jersey voters oppose same-sex marriage is invalid.

Numbers are less ambiguous when pollsters ask about same-sex rights in general. When Public Policy Polling and Quinnipiac asked whether respondents supported gay marriage, civil unions, or no special recognition, it was found that gay rights in some form were supported. In the Public Policy Polling report, those who support gay marriage came to 42 percent, those who propose civil unions but not marriage was 40 percent, and those who believed there should be no recognition for a gay couple’s relationship was 17 percent.iii When offered three choices in the November 2009 Quinnipiac poll, New Jersey voters responded as follows: 42 percent favor same-sex marriage; 30 percent favor civil unions, but not marriage; and 20 percent oppose any legal recognition of same-sex relationships. Voters also supported the existing law establishing civil unions for same sex couples, 63 percent to 30. Recent polling from the Pew Research Center shows that support for civil unions is at 57 percent.

These statistics are much more useful in analyzing public opinion and recommending policy because they show that many in New Jersey believe that gay couples should be afforded equal rights. These data demonstrate majority support for unions of same-sex couple that provides the benefits and responsibilities of opposite-sex marriage. The problem, it seems, is the terminology that is used to describe these rights. As we will see Friday, "marriage" is a loaded term with both secular and theological implications, depending on who wields the language. Regardless of the phrasing however, the fact is that an overwhelming majority of New Jersey and United States citizens support equal rights for same-sex couples.

The Changing Tide of Youth
Robert Putnam and David Campbell help to navigate the tension between politics and religion in their analysis of the landmark Faith Matters surveys, recorded in their book American Grace. The book analyzes in part the pull of religion on politics and of politics on religion. Putnam and Campbell make an interesting discovery about the nature of religiosity and political issues: “Religiosity has a tight connection to attitudes regarding abortion and gay marriage, and a more modest correlation – or none at all – to issues that do not pertain to sex and the family.” One’s beliefs on other issues are generally not affected by religion, but on the key issues of abortion and gay marriage there is a very strong tie. Religiosity plays a large role in these issues, but it is not a good indicator of whether someone is racist, or favors the death penalty, or believes that the United States should decrease immigration. Not only this, but politicians have built coalitions around the issues of abortion and gay marriage. After the 1980s, when these issues became tied to political parties, we see that religiosity and partisanship have come into alignment. Especially in the 2004 election cycle, Putnam and Campbell note, sex and family issues, already tied to religiosity, were tied to the Republican Party. Democrats only weakly embraced the opposite stance, but it became clear that embracing abortion and gay marriage rights were tied to lower religiosity and the left.

Campbell and Putnam’s study, however, also determined that Americans are becoming more accepting of same-sex marriage, and this is especially so of younger people. They attribute the findings to pop culture and lower religiosity among younger generations. So while politics shapes the way we express our religious convictions, culture and weakening religiosity work to reduce opposition to same-sex marriage issue at a “glacially slow” pace.

I don't want to put too fine a point on this, but it was a similarly slow pace of change, of course, that Martin Luther King, Jr.so strongly against in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail."

The Question of State Versus Nation
Even if marriage equality is achieved, the relationships of gay and lesbian couples will not be recognized on the national level.

The balance between state and nation in the question of gay marriage is a peculiar problem because states maintain control over marriages, but benefits conferred from recognized marriages are granted at both the state and the national level. With the exception of some benefits for the same-sex partners of some federal employees, federal benefits are not extended to same-sex couples in America. Massachusetts couples, for example, even though they are “married” in the eyes of the state, do not receive the same benefits that married couples do from the United States government. Civil unions receive even less protection.

Steps are being made to remedy this issue in other parts of the United States. In July 2011, Cambridge, Massachusetts made the unprecedented move of pay quarterly stipends to city employees in same-sex marriages to help defray federal taxes on health benefits for partners. This move seeks to address the inequality that arises when benefits for opposite sex spouses are not taxed. This patchwork remedy has its heart in the right place, but it does not address the fundamental inequality that gay couples suffer. Changes are necessary at the national level in order to afford rights to gay couples. For now though, action is focused primarily on the state level.

These are some of the issues that will inform the third installment of the series, which will focus on moral and religious dimensions of the debate. Look for that post Friday.

NJ Marriage Equality Part 1: State of the Civil Union

2012-01-09T06:00:00.002-05:00

This is the first part of a three-part series on gay marriage in New Jersey.
Part 2 will cover polling and statistics, while part 3 will focus on moral and religious issues.

It's time for another shot at marriage equality in New Jersey. The Star Ledger is reporting that a bill to legalize gay marriage is in the works:

In a dramatic gesture, Democratic leaders plan to announce Monday that a bill legalizing gay marriage will be the first measure to be introduced in the new session of the Senate and the Assembly, sources with knowledge of their intentions said tonight.

The unified Democratic leadership represents the best chance supporters will have to see a bill legalizing gay marriage move through both houses, according to three sources who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the plan.

Though the bill stands a chance of passing the state legislature, Governor Chris Christie remains the largest obstacle to marriage equality in New Jersey. He has spoken out against gay marriage in the past, stating on Meet the Press:

I am not a fan of same-sex marriage. It's not something that I support. I believe marriage should be between one man and one woman. That's my view, and that'll be the view of our state because I wouldn't sign a bill that - like the one that was in New York.

Indeed, a Democratic legislature failed to pass a similar bill in the waning days of Governor Corzine's governorship in 2009, before the Republican Christie took office.

New Jersey is not alone in wishing to advance the case of marriage equality. Same-sex marriage is currently legal in six states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York, as well as the District of Columbia. A May 2008 California Supreme Court decision allowed gay marriage for six months before a move to legislate the matter, Proposition 8, was voted down in November. Maine, the first state to establish same-sex marriage through legislation rather than a court ruling, enjoyed a similar six-month period of legalized same-sex marriage in 2009. The law was overturned via popular vote on a November ballot.

New Jersey, Hawaii and Illinois are the only U.S. states that currently permit civil unions, and only New Jersey permit these without attendant anti-gay marriage legislation. Twenty-nine states have such laws. Meanwhile, heterosexual marriage is legal in 50 states, and may be achieved through religious or secular means: the church or the courthouse.

Civil Unions or Gay Marriage?
Some wonder what the big deal is. Doesn't New Jersey already allow civil unions?

It does. The Civil Union Act was signed into law by Governor Jon Corzine on December 21, 2006 and came into effect on February 19, 2007. But the law has failed in achieving its stated goals. The New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission (CURC), established alongside the legalization of civil unions, found that the New Jersey law is ineffective at affording equal rights to gay couples as those received by married straight couples. New Jersey civil union law does not guarantee federal protection or equal treatment by insurance providers, hospitals, and the government. There have also been problems with requiring private-sector organizations to provide equal services as those offered to married couples.

The CURC issued a report in December 2008 based on the findings of 18 public meetings, 26 hours of oral testimony, and hundreds of pages of written submissions from more than 150 witnesses. It concluded:

[T]his Commission finds that the separate categorization established by the Civil Union Act invites and encourages unequal treatment of same-sex couples and their children. In a number of cases, the negative effect of the Civil Union Act on the physical and mental health of same-sex couples and their children is striking, largely because a number of employers and hospitals do not recognize the rights and benefits of marriage for civil union couples.

The CURC proposed three recommendations to remedy the apparent inequality.

It called on the legislature and governor to amend the law to allow couples to marry.
It proposed this law should be “enacted expeditiously because any delay in marriage equality will harm all the people of New Jersey.”
It recommended the continuation of the Domestic Partnership Act, which provides protection to committed though unmarried heterosexual and same-sex couples age 62 and over.

This legislation, which affects 4,800 same-sex and 100 opposite-sex couples, guarantees visitation, medical, funeral/autopsy/organ donation rights for domestic partners, as well as tax benefits and pensions benefits.

The commissions findings give a strong case to gay rights advocates because it grounds the argument in legal terms. Civil union legislation has failed to provide the rights and responsibilities it promised, and therefore must be fixed, or another law - such as a gay marriage law - should replace it.

When legislators failed to amend civil union law in 2009, gay rights organizations Lambda Legal and Garden State Equality turned to the courts.

The battle for marriage equality in New Jersey, therefore, is currently being fought both through the legislative and judicial branches of state government. But even a win through the legislature may be blocked by Christie. Even then, gay couples would miss out on federal benefits. So what does the state's population think of all this? That is the topic of the next article in this series, to be posted Wednesday.

Puff Puff? Pass.

2012-01-08T10:56:00.000-05:00

[G'day! Can I interest you in stereotypical characterization?]

SYDNEY — A study published Friday in a British medical journal may have uncovered the secret behind Australia's laid-back lifestyle, and it turns out to be more than just sun and surf: The folks Down Under consume more marijuana than any other people on the planet.

That's coming from a Seattle Times article published January 6, "Marijuana use highest in Australia, study finds." It's a report on an article published in the scientific journal, The Lancet, titled "Extent of illicit drug use and dependence, and their contribution to the global burden of disease."

The only problem is, the study didn't actually find that Australians (Oceanians in the study) consume more marijuana than any other nation.

Problem 1: The study does not look at net consumption. Rather it considers use percentage, meaning that a higher percentage of people from Oceania use pot than, say, Europeans. It does not indicate that Australia and New Zealand consume more weed than any other nation.

Problem 2: The journalist again fails in accurately explaining the research. The numbers presented in the study are sketchy, because they come from a variety of sources. Consumption of marijuana in Oceania is estimated at a range of 9.3-13.8 percent. North America, meanwhile, is estimated at exactly 10.7 percent, based on official government statistics. This means that at the highest rate of use, Oceania outpuffs North America, while at the lowest rate of use, North America outblazes Oceania.

Besides, if you're going to list the highest estimated percentage of use, west and central Africa wins the weed war hands down, with an estimated 5.2-14.6 percent use rate. This makes perfect sense, right? When most people think "laid back," the first nations that come to mind are the Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone. Which leads us to...

Problem 3: Stereotyping. It is the journalist's assertion that pot is linked to a society's collective lifestyle. He leaves out that Oceania also topped the list for amphetamines. And if there's one thing you don't want to take to have a laid back shrimp-on-the-barbie-que, it's a central nervous system stimulant.

Why not comment on the North American lifestyle, which has the highest rate of cocaine use (1.9 percent)? The answer is clear: First, an indicator such as drug use is insufficient for explaining broad cultural trends. Second, these cultural trends are themselves stereotypes, whereas the truth defies simple labeling. We saw above that North America has a high use rate of marijuana, but no one would say pot mellows Americans out. America simply isn't perceived that way.

The Seattle Times may have won eight Pulitzer Prizes, but its stereotyped and inaccurate coverage of this story should go up in smoke.

Occupy and the Environment

2011-12-03T13:03:00.001-05:00

Chris Hedges speaks on the Occupy Movement, addressing in particular Occupy Harvard. He then turns to the modern impetus to commodify everything, from human life to the environment. It is shameful that he should have to point out that humans are not resources and that resources are not infinite. But such is the intellectual framework of too many today. Bravo to Mr. Hedges for connecting Occupy and environmentalism!

The Death of News

2011-11-28T22:13:00.000-05:00

I can't post it here due to copyright issues, but I will provide a link to today's Non Sequitur comic, by Wiley Miller. I got a kick out of this one.

With tired eyes, tired minds, tired souls we slept

2011-11-20T19:07:00.001-05:00

This post contains only one accusation. Reading the news recently has gotten me too tense for my own good. There is plenty more to say about the Occupy movement, which is still doing great things to raise consciousness and getting people to think critically, even if it is at great expense to the protestors. At the New York Times, Thomas Friedman oversimplifies serious issues. I've wanted to write something about H.R. 3261: the Stop Online Privacy Act. However, my good friend Carlos has it covered. Another writing resource has helped somewhat to ease the stress. But news and academics have left me exhausted.

In anticipation of the deficit panel's failure to come to a consensus tomorrow, I would like to offer a more heartening picture of interpersonal cooperation. Black, white, Democrat, Republican, serving in religious and secular capacities. This comes from President Barack Obama's remarks at the highly-contested 2009 Notre Dame Commencement:

After all, I stand here today, as President and as an African American, on the 55th anniversary of the day that the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Now, Brown was of course the first major step in dismantling the "separate but equal" doctrine, but it would take a number of years and a nationwide movement to fully realize the dream of civil rights for all of God’s children. There were freedom rides and lunch counters and Billy clubs, and there was also a Civil Rights Commission appointed by President Eisenhower. It was the 12 resolutions recommended by this commission that would ultimately become law in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

There were six members of this commission. It included five whites and one African American; Democrats and Republicans; two Southern governors, the dean of a Southern law school, a Midwestern university president, and your own Father Ted Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame. (Applause.) So they worked for two years, and at times, President Eisenhower had to intervene personally since no hotel or restaurant in the South would serve the black and white members of the commission together. And finally, when they reached an impasse in Louisiana, Father Ted flew them all to Notre Dame’s retreat in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin -- (applause) -- where they eventually overcame their differences and hammered out a final deal.

And years later, President Eisenhower asked Father Ted how on Earth he was able to broker an agreement between men of such different backgrounds and beliefs. And Father Ted simply said that during their first dinner in Wisconsin, they discovered they were all fishermen. (Laughter.) And so he quickly readied a boat for a twilight trip out on the lake. They fished, and they talked, and they changed the course of history.

Amen.

Occupy This.

2011-11-11T18:17:00.010-05:00

Maybe CBS News should do some research and vetting the next time it reports a story, because it failed spectacularly in Lynn O'Shaughnessy's article, "Occupy Harvard: Nation's most exclusive tent city."

O'Shaughnessy gets credit for recognizing that Harvard posted guards to check IDs at the gate of the Yard.

One protestor, who is a junior, lamented upon the heightened security to a reporter for the Harvard Crimson: "I think it's absurd. Do we really need eight guards per gate?"

Midterms just ended here in Cambridge. Let's see how this article fares:

-5 points for not identifying the person
-5 points for taking the quote out of context (see link above)
-5 points for not mentioning that "8 guards" is hyperbole
-50 points for failing to state Occupy Harvard's true intention of creating a more equitable institution.
-20 points for making this issue seem way too easy. More on this below.

That comes to a 15, which is somewhere around an F with Harvard grade inflation taken into account. Nice try, but still a failing grade.

O'Shaughnessy makes a good point that education should be more equitable. But then again, so should distribution of income. The fact is, there is a lot more holding back low-income students before they even submit their college application. Only 8 percent of children that grow up in low-income communities graduate college by age 24. It is common knowledge among College Board test makers and education experts that there is a strong correlation between test scores and a family's level of income. And it's not just about money. Standardized testing is a terrible measure of aptitude that makes it easy for any educational institution to make a snap judgment. The problem is systemic, concretizing a test score into some supposedly meaningful measure when in fact it can just as easily serve as a reflection of student anxiety, family life, nutrition, income, and the school system he or she attends. Organizations like Teach for America recognize this and are fighting for change.

Harvard is an easy target, but the problem is an infinitely more complex system strongly linked to politics and economics.

This isn't all the journalist's fault. She probably had to meet a deadline. Sometimes you have to simplify. But there is a lot going on behind the scenes that cannot simply be dismissed. Education is a very complex issue, and to use the final graf for such an unsubstantiated statement is irresponsible.

- - -

This all being said, I think the Occupy movement is wonderful for people on all sides of the debate because it has finally raised pressing issues. The criticism that the movement lacks cohesive objectives might be valid in some respect, but that is part of Occupy's beauty. People raise the issues they think are relevant to them. A dialogue is beginning in the media, and as long as pundits are trying to mold the issue, facts and stats will get out and we will begin to determine how horrifyingly large, ingrained, and oppressive our current economic and political policies are. The wellspring of ideas that the Occupy movement has revealed is a true boon to America, for finally raising consciousness and debates about the issues. This is truly the first step to reform.

Dark Marketplaces

2011-11-08T12:43:00.004-05:00

You can buy and/or invest in virtually anything in the market economy...Creating an economy-based corollary to Rule 34. That's the last bit of fun we'll be having in this post.

"Investing in a Stranger's Retirement"

Looking to make some money off of someone in need? Buy someone's pension! From the article: "Several buyers of pension payments who were interviewed by The Wall Street Journal declined to be identified because they didn't want to be seen as profiting from anyone's financial desperation."

"What's Your Dead Body Worth"

When you're dead, you can donate your body to science. Or sell its organs on the market. What are you going to do with it anyway? While you're alive you can also sell an organ to pay off that loan...or to buy bread for your family...or because you're forced to by other means. The poor providing organs for the rich; I can hear Aldous Huxley's unsold bones rattling in his grave.

Tropical Islands!

While most of us can't afford a tropical island, the collective actions of western society ensure that someone else pays for our lifestyle. Rising seas, the direct result of climate change, stand to displace 70,000 people. The U.S. has already guaranteed Marshall Islanders strife and disease for years to come, and defined affected areas in a limited way so as to limit desperately-needed reparations.

The darkest marketplace of all is the one in which the full price of unchecked industrialization exacts payments from indigenous people around the world. This tribute is fully payable in suffering.

TOMS Debate at Ithaca College

2011-11-03T18:40:00.005-04:00

There is an interesting debate going on right now on the website for Buzzsaw, Ithaca College's independent student-run magazine.

In "Why I Hate TOMS Shoes," Topher Hendricks offers a compelling argument, if perhaps it took some discussion in the comments section to get there. Two points on this:

Comments are a great way to raise discussions and clarify points. That being said, it is best when the community is small, so that the discussion is not quickly swamped by a flood of comments. I try my hardest not to get sucked into comments sections on most blogs I read because the responses are inane and not interested in fostering conversation. (A few of these comments admittedly did appear in the Buzzsaw comments, but represented a small quantity and percentage of the total comments.)
Bravo to the author for responding to comments. In this case, it really helped to clarify his position. Comments served as a learning experience for the writer, readers, and commenters.

The piece is written in that classic angsty style college publications are famous for. It's well-reasoned, but needless flourishes like referring to TOMS CEO Blake Mycoskie as "Blakey boy" in parentheses do nothing to advance the argument. [caveat: I did once refer to Rick Reilly as a "Pompous Asshat" in the title of a piece.] That being said, referring to someone as a "douche" and then referring to oneself as a "douche" as well is a great move. Self deprecation is a great tool for winning people over. See also Hunter S. Thompson.

Hendricks notes that he will soon receive the shoes as a reward for a credit card, which raising a hairy issue. Getting the shoes for free exonerates no one, but on the other hand, half of his reward will support someone "in need." Maybe even the person who made the shoes, if indeed TOMS manufacturing practices are as cheery as they'd lead you to believe.

The fact that the shoes come for credit card usage is complexified by a comment in a follow-up piece by Rebecca Coffman, "A Different Perspective on TOMS Shoes." She writes:

I believe that society’s energy and resources should be aimed towards unraveling actual charades, and not merely attacking companies based on confused and misdirected anti-capitalistic rage. TOMS shoes may not be a revolution. But they may enable the people whose feet they clothe to start one of their own.

But Hendricks' article does point to a charade: Westerners are made to feel good by their purchases, but they don't see everything that goes into creating the shoes. The fact is we don't know about the working conditions, or whether shoes are causing some sort of social problem in the communities where they are distributed. A particularly interesting quote from the TOMS "Giving Report":

Shoes are a status symbol [in Ethiopia]. Children dream of having their first pair.

If you listen closely you can hear the distant rumble of the free market (dare I invoke that dastardly term, "neoliberalism"?). Using one consumer culture to create another - I would say "only in America," but the process is necessarily international.

Besides, there are more pressing issues than footwear. Think of how much good can come from providing, say, access to water, or healthcare, or education.

But back to that comment about the original article being penned in a fit of "anti-capitalist rage." Dude got the shoes through his credit card.

Bubble Kings

2011-03-02T05:46:00.003-05:00

Excerpt from my other blog, "The Word." It seemed applicable to some of the topics I write about on this blog, so I decided to include it here. For a little context on dialectical tensions, the difference between God's will and human action that informs and shapes the bible, take a look at a post on 2 Chronicles 10-16.

Read the Full Post.

For anyone that follows the economy, or are really sore about it, it might help to take a look at the cycle of kings presented in the Books of Kings and Chronicles in terms of bubbles (and while you're at it, read anything and everything by Matt Taibbi). Market bubbles, dialectical tension bubbles...Whatever. The point is that there is imbalance until the bubble pops.

Strict regulation [adherence to God's word] means things go pretty well, though there isn't much room to - you know - stretch out and test the limits. As regulations are chiseled away [i.e. kings fall from God's will] by human nature manifested by greed [and apostasy], things go well for a while, or at least people think they do. In reality, a bubble is forming, a pressure differential that arises from what is promised and what in reality exists [In the case of the economic crisis, money. In the case of the bible, adherence to God's word]. Just as in nature, the bubble cannot sustain itself, and it bursts. The bank goes under. Judah is invaded.

Here's where the metaphor gets really sick and twisted. For some reason these bubbles continue. For some reason they are allowed to happen. In the Bible, God allows for a certain degree of human freedom before he himself teaches his own people a lesson. Old generations are replaced, and the cycle generally finds a good king to lead again. In case of the financial crisis, the U.S. government allows for a certain degree of freedom before the whole thing comes crashing down on its own accord. And then it bails out the people who perpetrated the crime.

Allow me to take my metaphor too far: the state of safety is adherence to God. [And you can draw your own conclusions about the parallel metaphor.]

But I progress.

Read the Full Post.

Poetry, Christian Interpretation, Quantum Physics

2010-11-30T22:43:00.003-05:00

I would encourage you all to check out the latest post at The Word, which now runs weekly on Tuesdays, by the way. It's a little looser now, a little more personal. For example, this week's post tackles the tale of David's early kingship through poetry, christian interpretation (inspired by Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth), and quantum physics (in particular the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).

Let me know what you think!

God Is

2010-11-07T15:23:00.002-05:00

I sort that I may construct
rough-hewn thoughts into
corpus - my dust and breath,

hurl abstract words
small as stones
into the slag heap,

saving, savoring concrete
words with which I raise my synagogue
foundation - writing, rhetoric, resonance.

I wish life was a stone
I did not have to cast
with the others as I

build my beautiful Babel,
my altar of witness that
sin is a mere word, that

sacrifice is meaningless, that
faith is ritual only, that
objects matter neither,

and that God is not written
throughout. With this
knowledge I build,

from the slag heap
construct my faith.

Nine Years Later

2010-09-11T18:27:00.003-04:00

Nine years after 9/11, the emphasis seems less on the victims of the attacks than on the state of Islam within the United States and the world today.

"We are not at war against Islam. We are at war against terrorist organizations that have distorted Islam or falsely used the banner of Islam."
-President Barack Obama, September 10, 2010

"We are all Americans, we stand together," Obama said. "I think it is absolutely important now for majority of Americans to hang onto that thing that is best in us: a belief in religious tolerance. We have to make sure we don't start turning on each other."
-President Barack Obama, September 10, 2010

"One of the things I most admired about President Bush was after 9/11, him being crystal clear about the fact that we were not at war with Islam, we were at war with terrorists and murderers who had perverted Islam ... to carry out their acts."
-President Barack Obama, September 10, 2010

"I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."
-Former President George Bush, June 2003

"I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I will be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then of course, I pray for forgiveness."
-Former President George Bush, as told to Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack, 2004

Muslim. In a country in which 49 percent of the population holds an unfavorable view of Islam, "Muslim" has become a pejorative term.

Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim.

Oh crap, did I just say that out loud? Will I be able to keep my job over this? Can I say stuff like that on my blog? You bet I can, Muhammad! [No, come on, I'm just kidding, that was just for shock value.]

Somehow in this nation we have combined our ideas of Islam and radical Islam so that many believe that all Muslims are radicals that hate America. This is simply not true, Muhammad. Seriously. I have created a syllogism in an attempt to convey the current trend in American thinking:

Radical Muslims attacked America on 9/11
?????
All Muslims are radical and hate America

That makes perfect sense, right? From there it's just plug and play, Muhammad:

Some Christians in the KKK hate blacks and Jews
?????
All Christians hate blacks and Jews

Holy Martin Luther King, Muhammad, why did he hate himself?

Part of the problem is that a good deal of rhetoric distances "America" from "Muslims" when, in fact many Americans are Muslim. That's why I keep addressing you as Muhammad, Muhammad. America allows all religions to be practiced within its borders, even the peaceful ones in which jihad means an interior spiritual struggle and Islam means "submission." I know it's terrible, Muhammad, that we allow such awful people to practice religion in this country. I mean, Islam is one of the greatest orthopraxic religions around. You want faith? Try praying 5 times a day facing Mecca. Try fasting during daylight hours for an entire month - whether summer or winter. Oh, and your sacred text is non-translatable because to translate it would be to confuse the language.

Muhammad, is this not a pious faith?

News coverage of 9/11 today covered three topics:

Honoring the victims
The Park51 community center and mosque
Asshat Pastor Terry Jones and his Quran-burning stupidity

In the same way that Muslims have all become radical, these topics were all combined into the same idea, so that preventing the mosque honored the victims, burning the bible put a barb into Islam (which therefore honored the victims) and burning the bible challenged Park 51. I don't get it. The Muslims that are building the mosque are not the ones that attacked on September 11. Likewise, the Christian president that leads our nation today is not of the same type as the Christian Nazis that killed millions of Jews, gays, Catholics, etc.

But, Muhammad, you tell me President Barack Hussein Obama was born in Africa and is a practicing Muslim-homosexual-polygamist-vegan-speed-freak on the side, besides being the Antichrist [thank the Lord the end is near!]. Well, Muhammad, you are much better informed than 82 percent of America.

This nation allows the freedom to burn the Quran, the Bible, the Cross, the Torah, the Rig Veda, and Beatles records. But before you do this, Muhammad, I recommend you read up on the religion you think you hate, and meet up with a few people from that religion. Get to know them, really. Then you will understand that they are human as well and they have faith with striking parallels to yours. Let us all get to know each other, each of us a Muhammad.

You may wonder why I have addressed you as Muhammad, this whole time. Well, Jesus, it is because that as Americans we are all in this together. Yes, Moses, Americans come from all sorts of faith. Buddha, that means your brethren may be Sikh or atheist or Wiccan.

Peace between religions, and religious tolerance in America, is a long way away. But we have had 9 years to at least figure out the difference between Islam and its radical variant. Muhammad, I weary of our hatred. Inshallah, let us find peace soon.

State of the Union

2010-08-26T14:32:00.004-04:00

"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality."
-Martin Luther King Jr.'s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 1964

"If Dwight Eisenhower had come back from the war and decided to run as a Democrat - which he almost did - there would be no Republican party today. They would be like the Ku Klux Klan, small knots of hate-crazed rich people scattered in walled ghettos around the country, instead of the dominant ruling autocracy that they have been for most of the last four decades."
-Hunter S. Thompson, "Better Than Sex"

It makes me sick. The other day I saw a Muslim - a MUSLIM walking in lower Manhattan, just a block a way from Ground Zero. Let me repeat that. A Muslim has the audacity to walk so close to the place where a group of Muslims killed so many Americans on September 11, 2001.

I don't care that you won't be able to see the Park51 community center with its mosque from Ground Zero. It shouldn't be there at all. It's not that I'm afraid of Muslims - it's just that I don't want them to kill me and corrupt my children.

It's not that I don't want Muslims in Manhattan, it's just that I don't want Muslims in this Christian Nation. In fact, if we can do away with all the Muslims, Homosexuals, Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Democrats, Socialists, and Pedophiles we will be pretty close to what the founding fathers intended. I don't believe they ever intended for this place to be overrun with immigrants and foreigners. So let's do them the favor and kick them out.

2,752 people died in New York on 9/11, excluding the hijackers. In total, 2,995 died, including the 19 hijackers. What did the 19 hijackers have in common? They were all Muslim. What does this community center and mosque have in common with them? It's Muslim as well! It's amazing. [The "white rights" group, on the other hand, the KKK, is all about nonviolence! (What's that, you say? They link to Storm Front? Well that's just a coincidence, isn't it?)]

The other day I asked a friend about the whole thing and he said, "Well, people have the freedom to practice their religion in the United States." I said show me where and he pointed me to the First Amendment of the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And so I said, Well, Arizona doesn't give a shit about the Fourth, so why New York give one about the First? [Sorry about the link to that long-haired hippy-liberal piece of trash, but it's the best I can find]. He just kind of looked at me confused. Then he told me something that made me kind of sad. Anyone can be a Muslim. Thankfully, most people aren't. I knew Arabs and Blacks could be Muslim, but I had no idea whites could be as well. It's just a testament to the strength of their brainwashing. All those poor children consumed by Allah.

I used to think they were all alike. Some Arabs will tell you they are "Sikhs." Don't be fooled - they are Muslims as well. In fact, these are some of the most dangerous Muslims because they carry a sword or dagger. Now it turns out Muslims can be anywhere.

So if these so-called people are using their so-called "freedom of religion" to put a MUSLIM community center and mosque two blocks behind Ground Zero (and I don't care that it will be hidden behind buildings - it will still be there) we should use our freedom of speech against it. After all, there is no Constitutional Amendment that forbids hate. Otherwise this wouldn't be an issue in the first place!

So here's my plan for getting back: hit them where it hurts. Was everybody sure to draw a picture of Mohammed for "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day?" I know I did. Here's my reference image:

[Courtesy change.org. By the way - check out the name of the "Designated Agent." It's a huge conspiracy.]

Barack Saddam Hussein Obama Bin Laden. How did he ever get elected president? He wasn't even born in the United States. By the way, did you know that 82 percent of Americans don't know that Obama is Muslim? That's up 7 percent since last year. People have been finding out! I'm glad Americans are getting so well educated.

Biblical Comics

2010-08-22T15:57:00.002-04:00

Something I have been considering is creating a series of biblical comics, to be dubbed "The Bible for Grown-Ups." Just as children's bibles contain all the age-appropriate stories, this series will relate all the adult stories. Believe me, the bible is replete with sex and violence.

In any case, I did a comic for today's post on The Word that sort of lies within this vein. Check it out at The Word.

Cooking up some trouble

2010-08-17T11:48:00.007-04:00

One of the unfortunate residual effects of writing an article on 9/11 conspiracy theorists is a nagging desire every four months or so to visit some Alex Jones web site, either Prison Planet or Info Wars to see what the fear mongerer is up to. If you're ever in the mood to be terrified - not by what Alex Jones proposes, but by the fact that people actually believe him - this is a wonderful pastime activity.

And if you're interested in advertising for doomsday scenarios and the impending collapse of government and financial sector - oh my! There are evacuation packs, filter kits to take that brain-washing fluoride out of tap water, "don't tread on me" clothing, lead-free x-ray-proof clothing, and ads telling you to buy gold NOW.

My favorite today, however, was the Crisis Cooker, which retails for $160. Now, let me tell you a little something about this contraption. It burns any fuel. Really - any fuel you could think to burn. However, it seems to be designed for charcoal and wood. And it's incredibly efficient. Your chicken will be done in less than an hour! And it can double as a personal heater!

Has anyone ever thought of this before? Surely no one has thought of such a -

Oh.

Yeah. That's been around for a while, hasn't it? Under $30 and it doubles as a dutch oven too! All you have to do is bury it in the ground. No, seriously. That's what a dutch oven is. You'd think they'd have adopted kitchens by now, but they still do all their cooking outside.

Perhaps my favorite two things about purveyors of these fine fear mongering products is one, their surety that the end is nigh, and two, their unshakable belief that they are constantly being watched, which sets them in a state of hyper-awareness (read: fear of the New World Order).

By the way, these just happen to be the two points expressed in the P.S. and P.P.S. at the bottom of the page.

P.S. This purchase could easily prove to be a “life-saving” purchase. If Israel or the U.S. bombs Iran, or if we have terrorist activities on our soil again… the supply of these cookers will go to zero over night. I know that sounds like fear mongering. But it’s not. It’s the truth. Only God knows how much time we have left before all hell breaks loose in America.

P.S.S. Don’t forget to start buying bags of charcoal while you can. Buy a few bags at a time so as not to grow suspicion.

I like that last one so much I cooked up (get it?) a little comic to convey the sentiment. Click to enlarge:

The NWO-Conspiracy Theorist mindset, in fact, makes Teapartiers seem almost heroic. I am not a fan of Teapartiers or the racist, sexist, homophobic Teabaggers, but at least these people are sure of themselves. Whereas this "crisis cooker" guy buys a few bags at a time so the government will not catch on, a Teapartier would proclaim, "It is my constitutional right to buy as much charcoal as I want!" Teapartiers, I imagine, are at least informed enough and bold enough to do that. I might not agree with their politics, but holy crap do they have balls.

P.S. I wish I got paid to link advertisements while making fun of people. That would be an awesome job. Only problem is I'd want to say who I wanted to make fun of and would probably make fun of the product as well. Heh, dutch ovens.

P.P.S. Bonus Music on MySpace:
Two Dollar Grill (Long Journey Home) by Hee Haw Nightmare

Help a School In Need!

2010-08-04T10:53:00.004-04:00

When I was applying to Teach For America, the thing that struck me the most was the educational inequity for low-income areas. Free public education is not, it turns out, does not ensure equal opportunities for all. Only 1 in 10 students growing up in poverty will graduate college, and half do not graduate high school by age 18.

And then there is the school itself. This is most tangible manifestation of educational inequity. How are children supposed to learn the skills they need when the roof leaks, the water is not drinkable, and there is no place to eat lunch?

This is the question my friend Mary Michalow is facing. An excellent journalist, she is now working to become an excellent teacher, seeking a Master's in Elementary Education from the University of Pennsylvania. She is student teaching at Blankenburg Elementary School at Philadelphia, where the situation is dire. So she is reaching out through Kohl's Cares to try to win $500,000 for her school. Below is the description on Facebook:

Imagine going to school in a building where you'll get lead poisoning if you drink water out of the bathroom sinks. The hallways flood with an inch of standing water when it rains, making them impassable. The cafeteria is in a trailer outside because the school building doesn't have one. There is no playground to play on for recess.

For students at Blankenburg Elementary School in Philadelphia, this is a reality.

I'm student teaching at Blankenburg this fall, and I'm heartbroken that students have to learn in an environment like this. So please, vote for Blankenburg on Kohl's Cares. Vote 5 times. And get your friends to vote. And their friends. The more people, the better. Our school is already at a disadvantage because most of the students don't have computers at home to vote, so your votes are even more important. The school could get $500,000 to spend on improvements.

To you it's 5 mouse clicks, to these kids it could mean a roof that doesn't leak and flood the school.

Vote here (5 times!): http://apps.facebook.com/KohlsCares/school/789851/blankenburg-rudolph-sch?src=SchoolShare&_fb_fromhash=30f7df30684bbc7b1f866186a79a591c&ref=mf

I encourage everyone to join the group and cast five votes for Blankenburg. Send this link to your friends! It just takes a few moments and could have a lasting impact in educating children in need.

Boom.

2010-07-29T20:36:00.003-04:00

Click to enlarge.

100th Post!

2010-07-28T18:24:00.004-04:00

In honor of the 100th post on this blog, I would like to present 2 PSAs for safe living. The first was inspired by the "Carol never wore her safety goggles" advertisement/safety poster/internet meme. The second was inspired by a number of drug PSAs.

Seriously.

On Joe Pesci and...Myself?

2010-07-16T12:21:00.002-04:00

My most recent article freelanced for the Florham Park Eagle: Chipping for the Yutes.

Also, an I was profiled (e-mail interviewed, cut and pasted) in Randolph-Roxbury This Week.

Also, if you're into displays of polytheism, check out the Golden Calf post on The Word. If you're into pretty colors and textual rippling, check out The Command to Leave Sinai.

Photoshop fail.

2010-07-14T00:04:00.006-04:00

Take a look at this ad, found on Slate's Doonesbury page. Do you see the problem?

If not, check it out below:

You're killing me, American Express. I'm glad your advertising team is skilled with the Photoshop reverse function, but I would prefer you not make it so that a casual browser like me notices your blatant eyewash.

Lesson: Don't use the same picture twice in the same advertisement.

We all know, are, people like this

2010-07-11T16:49:00.001-04:00

Interesting reading in the Boston Globe: How Facts Backfire

New Jersey's News Quotes du Jour

2010-07-07T14:20:00.002-04:00

What is this, Fark?

The Middle East is explosive.

Israel, a democracy in an explosive region, is counting on unwavering support from the U.S.

Surely there is a better way to put that. [article]

Ex-Seton Hall basketball coach is surprised.

"If you went on (Microsoft) Word and put in ‘surprised’ and looked at the synonyms, he was any of those," said Parin, 20, recounting her June 29 encounter.

Who needs a dictionary anymore? [article]

Two New Articles

2010-07-06T09:27:00.003-04:00

I just had two new articles published in the Randolph Reporter. I remember covering budget meetings in college. Awesome stuff.

Raking in the Big Bucks

Mine Hill Budget

Return of Myxomatosis

2010-06-25T13:49:00.003-04:00

It's been a while, but I thought it was a good time to resurrect this blog. Speaking of good times, now would be a good time to check out my other blog, The Word, a blog that reads the bible as a piece of literature rather than as a sacred text. You should check it out. And tell all your friends! Please?

I'm freelancing right now for a local weekly, the Randolph Reporter.

Here is my most recent article, as published.

Here is my most recent article as I submitted it, for the sake of comparison. I know it's not perfect - I should have given Collins a voice, or at least mentioned that she did speak. It was nice, however, to have the characters for the most part speak for themselves.

Debate Erupts Over Liquor Licenses

MINE HILL TWP. – After an hour of minimal public participation, the June 17 council meeting exploded into a lively debate concerning the renewal of New Jersey Bar and Grill’s liquor license.

A fairly laconic meeting saw the township council unanimously pass approval for liquor licenses renewals for three businesses: Gold ‘N Dough Partners LLC, Mine Hill American Legion and L & L Package Store.

After this, an hour-and-a-half long debate ensued over whether to renew without restrictions the liquor license for the New Jersey Bar and Grill at 100 Randolph Ave.

Both council president Sam Morris of 3 Indian Falls Rd. and council vice president Cindy Collins of 9 Indian Falls Rd. recused themselves as interested parties. Morris was the first to address the council from the public microphone. He suggested six restrictions be placed on the liquor license, ranging from the type of music that can be played to the late hour at which workers dump glass bottles into bins outside. Morris passed around pictures of an incident on June 6, in which a modified Jeep damaged another vehicle in the parking lot. The driver in that incident was arrested. Morris also passed around pictures of a person with a beverage in hand outside of the bar and photos of mulch dumped on the property, which he said was near a stream.

“The point is they are absolutely not in control of the outside of their building.” Morris said. “If you own it, you gotta deal with it. It’s a responsibility thing.”

“My reasons for rejecting the renewal of the license without any restrictions are completely selfish. I’m tired of my kids getting woken up.” Morris told the council. “And I’m going to say right now, if they won’t agree to any restrictions, all of these restrictions and have all these pieces put in place, I’m gonna ask you not to renew the license at all.”

Morris also said he would contact the Division of Alcohol Beverage Control if steps were not taken to remedy his concerns.

Gail Hrynio, of 107 Randolph Ave., addressed the council regarding the noise and drinking. “They’re just not in control of their property, or if they are they just don’t care” she said. She also said that calls to the police did not stop the noise.

Wharton Borough Police Chief Anthony Fernandez responded that a complainant must go to the Dover Court to sign an official citizen’s complaint: “We can’t just show up and determine that there’s noise. You’re the one that’s being disturbed by the noise. We will take the report, we will tell them to knock off the noise, but it’s up to the citizen to sign a complaint.” Complaints may be filed at the Dover Joint Municipal Court on 37 N. Sussex Street. Fernandez also said that without calls to the police station and complaints, it is difficult to argue against renewing a liquor license.

Attorney Edward Bilinkas defended the owners of the bar. He emphasized that most of the complaints had nothing to do with the liquor license: “Certain people have an agenda here and they don’t want the bar here. They would rather the bar not be in their neighborhood.”

Bilinkas described New Jersey Bar and Grill as a “family establishment.” As for the music, “I’ve looked at your ordinance. I don’t think it’s specific. I think if a charge is filed, that charge will fail.”

Bilinkas continued, “We’re looking to work with the town. We want to be considerate and we want to make everybody as happy as possible, but to place restrictions on the license would clearly affect the value of the license and their ability to stay in business and make a living.”

Afterwards co-owner Greg Galdieri, of 44 W Munson Ave., Dover, spoke with council members Conrad Pepperman and Kristine Kauzenbach on ways the bar could avoid complaints from the public.

In the end, the liquor license was approved without any restrictions. The room emptied quickly after the 90-minute long debate.

Morris said that last year he and Cindy Collins planned to voice similar complaints, but did not attend the correct meeting. “I don’t want anyone to think just because I’ve been elected to town council all of a sudden we’re showing up. Last year it was a date snafu.”

There was one more item of business before the meeting adjourned. “I want to put this in the record,” Morris said, again recusing himself and stepping up to the mic. Pulling out his cell phone, he described a text message he had just received from Hrynio, describing four cars that pulled out of the New Jersey Bar and Grill parking lot moments before blowing their car horns, one of which she said might have been driven by “the lawyer.”

“Now, is that substantiable? [sic]” Morris asked. “I don’t know. But now it’s on record.”

###

2010-05-23T22:33:00.004-04:00

It has been some time since I last posted on this blog, and it will probably be a long time before I post next.

It was a busy semester, but I am graduating with a B.A in Journalism and a B.A. with Honors in English. Now it's time to apply to grad school.

In the meantime, though, I am taking up a project I essentially lifted from The Julia Project, made famous in the film Julie and Julia.

I will blog every day on stories from the bible - reading the bible cover-to-cover as a piece of literature. Hopefully I will learn something in the process. And if you are interested, maybe you will as well. Check it out at The Word.

I hope to update this site periodically, but really cannot promise anything. So come read a little scripture with me!

History Lesson

2010-05-03T19:51:00.005-04:00

[Update with regards to the last post: There will be no narrative journalism insert due to logistical issues. I'm still going to try to get my final article published somewhere. Let me know if you would like to see it.]

In doing research for my thesis, I stumbled upon a gem: the first issue of the New York Times, then called New-York Daily Times. The first printing was 18 September 1851. You could pick it up for a penny - that covered the physical paper; profit and paychecks came from advertisements. There was no Sunday edition.

The first edition featured "A Word about Ourselves." I will let these excerpts speak for themselves. And then I will highlight bits I think are important, as a gloss. So they won't be speaking for themselves, after all.

We understand perfectly, that great capital, great industry, great patience are indispensable to its success, and that even with all these, failure is not impossible. But we know also, that within the last five years the reading population of this city has nearly doubled, while the number of daily newspapers is no greater now than it was then; - that many of those now published are really class journals, made up for particular classes of readers; - that others are objectionable upon grounds of morality; - and that no newspaper, which was really fit to live, ever yet expired for lack of readers.

Upon all topics, - Political, Social, Moral and Religious, - we intend that the paper shall speak for itself; - and we only ask that it may be judged accordingly. We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good; - and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform. We do not believe that everything in Society is either exactly right, or exactly wrong; - what is good we desire to preserve and improve; - what is evil, to exterminate, or reform.

...And while we design to be decided an explicit in our positions, we shall at the same time seek to be temperate and measured in all our language...There are very few things in this world which it is worth while to get angry about; and they are just the things that anger will not improve.

We hope to make the Daily Times acceptable to the great mass of our people, and shall spare no effort to do so. We have an abundance of means, -plenty of able and experienced assistance, and every facility for making at once, the best and the cheapest newspaper in the United States.

Writing Update

2010-04-30T11:32:00.004-04:00

One thing I try not to do in my posts is apologize for not posting because I have been busy.

I am all but done with Narrative Journalism, having finished my long-form piece on beer and brewing in Ithaca. Right now I am looking to get it published somewhere, so I should probably stop posting extracts online. But I can't help myself. Here's the lede paragraph:

Tell me, O muse, of the drink of many flavors,
That’s traveled far and wide and drunken drinkers of old.
Many are the men whose hearts it heartened and speeches it slurred.
Pale ale to pitch-black porter, lightest lager to richest imperial stout,
I seek beer, served in pub and bar and brewed in home and brewery.
Through my own folly I fail, fool, drinking without discerning,
As though Dionysus himself kept me from learning.
Of these things, fermenter of imagination, tell me,
In my search for perfect beer in snowy Ithaca.

That's what it's all about, in a barley husk.

Previous chapters:
Trappist Westvleteren
Beer, in a Barley Husk
Driving to the Ithaca Beer Company (Excised from the final draft)
Trivia at the Nameless Bar (Significantly cut down in the final draft)

I was talking with a friend yesterday about how well all the pieces are turning out. It is amazing how much improvement comes with four years of writing. And as much as I love to lambast The Ithacan - for its rowing coverage [except for the women's team, which has a great reporter covering them this year], accent section, and pretty much anything else that catches my eye - I encourage everyone to pick up an issue next week, which will have a special insert of select narrative pieces produced in Narrative Journalism Workshop. Perhaps even mine.

At this point this post has been mostly about me. Allow me to direct you, then, to "Homebrewed Beer," the blog of a man I watched brew as part of my Narrative piece. He posts a recipe and detailed analysis for every beer he brews. It's pretty awesome.

Besides an eight-page research paper for my Biblical Interpretation class, the last bit of writing for the semester is my English honors thesis on the memetic use of "apocalypse" in the environmentalism movement. I am taking a look at the way environmentalists write about this "environmental apocalypse" and what it says about their outlook. Right now I am working on a section tentatively titled "Polar bears and other native populations."

Essentially the second semester of my senior year has been dedicated to combining my passions: beer and journalism (and poetry), reading and communications and writing and religion. After writing about what everyone else wanted me to write about for years, I feel very fortunate to be able to write about what I want. Hat tips to professors Twomey and Schack. Actually, what I just wrote is not entirely fair. Big hat tip to professor Cohen for inspiring me to blog and thereby continue writing about what I want to write about. Thank you all.

And if you've made it this far, thank you for reading

Trappist Westvleteren

2010-04-22T21:08:00.002-04:00

My search for the perfect pint continues. Excerpted below is a section from a piece I am working on for my narrative journalism class on beer and brewing in Ithaca. Previous excerpts can be found at the bottom of this post.

...Around this time I take my search for the perfect pint online out of sheer desperation. The ones I’ve tried are good, even great, but not quite what I am searching for. Countless online resources claim to have found the holy grail of beers, and the search can be quite similar to a wine connoisseur searching for an elusive bottle. I stumble upon the website of what is arguable the world’s finest beer, Trappist Westvleteren, brewed in small batches by Belgian monks in a centuries-old tradition. I decide to forego this beer upon reading the instructions for buying a crate:

1. Fly to Belgium and rent a car. You will need the car’s license plate number to be allowed into the abbey.

2. Check online for the monthly calendar giving the date and times reservations may be made to purchase a 24-bottle crate. In April, that comes to seven hours total: between 9:00 and 12:00 local time on April 8 to purchase three crates of Trappist Westvleteren 12 and between 10:00 and 12:00 on April 13 and 14 to purchase two crates of Trappist Westvleteren Blond.

3. Call up the abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren to make said reservation (+32 (0)70/21.00.45). You will wait in a long phone queue, and your call might not even be answered. You will need to specify the time you come and the license plate number of the car you will be driving. One order per car per telephone number (they check!) per month.

4. Drive to Donkerstraat 12, B -8640 Westvleteren. Beer may be picked up at a specified time Monday through Wednesday, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

5. Pay 38 euros for a 24-bottle crate of Westvleteren 12 (28 for the Blond) plus a 12-euro deposit. (About $68 total or $2.83 a beer. Not so bad if you don’t count the flight, car rental, and accommodations in Belgium).

6. Enjoy, or age in a cool cellar to perfection. And no reselling. Not that you would buy a few cases and resell the bottles at over 1,200 percent markup. Nor would you send it to your buddies through the mail. That’s illegal. And God just might be keeping track of his divine suds.

Is it worth it? For some, no doubt. But is it perfect?

Previous Excerpts:
Beer, in a Barley Husk
Driving to the Ithaca Beer Company (Excised from the final draft)
Trivia at the Nameless Bar (Significantly cut down in the final draft)

Beer, in a Barley Husk

2010-04-21T14:38:00.001-04:00

What follows in an excerpt from my narrative journalism piece on brewing in Ithaca:

Beer is made of four ingredients: malted barley, hops, yeast, and water. The Reinheitsgebot, or German Beer Purity Law, was passed April 23, 1516 and forbid brewers from using any ingredients in beer other than barley, hops, and water. This was in the days before knowledge of yeast, when the muck at the bottom of fermentation vats would be scooped up and brewed into new batches. That muck was rich in yeast, the essential component of converting sugar to alcohol.

Today, beer is made with a number of other ingredients, including corn, rice and wheat. And though the Reinheitsgebot has been repealed (and never affected American brewers anyway) purists still stick to the four ingredients. The basics, however, are still the same. Let’s get to know them, shall we?

2-Row Pale Malt: Barley picked and submerged in water till it begins to sprout. Placed in a kiln, the barley becomes frozen in time, with a great supply of sugars that have converted from starches in order to feed the once-growing plant. But you have to know it.

Place your proboscis upon it. “Cereal grain” seems so anachronistically fitting – it smells like sweet cheerios – the grainy smell of a barn – not of hay, but of sweet barley – not the cardboardy smell of oatmeal. It’s an intense aroma, but a sweet one for sure, and almost musty. It is a tan color, more yellow brown than sunflower seeds, with a similar but rounder shape, like an unblossomed tulip, yonic in its curves and creases. Peel away its brittle hull, beneath, the hard casing cleaves in a way Georgia O’Keefe might very much appreciate.

Put one on your tongue, transfer it to your molars and bite down. There is a satisfying crunch between your teeth, and then the same taste as the smell. But dig deeper. Taste the nutty hull, and then focus on the sweet inside, sweet inside the way a coconut is, with a sort of meatiness to it – not all sweet, but sweet with something behind it. Bite it in half – it’s white on the inside like popcorn – like a popcorn kernel the casing gets lodged in your teeth the same annoying way. Roll the husk on your tongue and swallow.

Hops: I never actually got to see a hop vine laden with upside-down humulus lupulus reeking of flowers and citrus and earth, never peeled back the pinecone bracts of that bitter bud, cousin of cannabis. No yonic symbolism here, though the resins and oils for brewing strictly reside in the cones of female plants. And as the plants are perennial and therefore may be reproduced through cuttings, they stand rigidly in Amazonian ranks up poles and wire.

Ah, but I have only seen palletized hops, which have been milled and compressed into capsules green as grass and remind me in color and shape and texture of the PennMulch I spread the summer I worked landscaping. But smell and taste! Cascades pour forth the tang of grapefruit and flowers, Centennials waft lemon and bitter herb, Magnums dispatch sour earth and grass...

Jeremy Scahill Wins Izzy Award for Independent Media

2010-03-24T14:55:00.002-04:00

Check out the press release.

Check out coverage of last year's Izzy Awards.

Info on the ceremony forthcoming.

- - -

Sorry for the lack of updates. I was rowing all last week in Georgia and was usually rowing, eating, sleeping, or too tired to put together a post. I've got a bunch of projects going on at once but look forward to writing an entry on indymedia and beer (together). It's like peanut butter and jelly or Sonny and Cher or Ithaca and cold gray winters.

Alice in La La Land (Spoiler Below)

2010-03-09T07:36:00.004-05:00

Pop-ups in a newspaper? Come on, that's just tacky. The Wall Street Journal has been doing nontraditional ads as well, ever since you-know-who became you-know-what. But.

Just yesterday I thought I got the end of a roll of paper in The Journal Report's coverage of the Environment. There was the front page, then in front of that, a half-front page with the same text and graphic, connected to a full page on the back. You could pull away the false front page to reveal a one-and-a-half page BMW ad. Now that's clever! But.

But the difference between the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times is that the LA Times made it so that the entire front page was an advertisement! You could still read everything you needed to in the Wall Street Journal without a painted Johnny Depp inviting you to see his latest movie (which, by the way, was formulaic, visually riveting but soulless, and not nearly odd enough to grab my attention).

End Transmission.

SPOILER:

As I see it, the ending can be interpreted one of two ways:
1. In support of Imperialism, Opium Trade/Opium Wars, and "RAPE OF CHINA!" as one friend put it.
2. An ironic rejection of this. After all, Alice is Crazy, and only crazy people could possibly come up with ideas like trading with China, D.A.R.E. [why yes, that is from the Surgeon General], and funding drug-producing contras and turning a blind eye when these drugs make their way into America. Among other things.

I sure hope it is the second. Otherwise it's a very cold and frightening move on Burton's part. But with my disappointment in the movie, I am inclined to believe Burton's message is the first option.

Narrative Journalism

2010-03-07T16:59:00.006-05:00

As part of my final project for Narrative Journalism, I am posting pieces of my work here as I write. They might just be sentences, paragraphs, full stories. They will be achronological and non-narrative. This is mostly an exercise for me, but I hope you enjoy them nonetheless. Feel free to comment or e-mail me with suggestions!

See the last section: Trivia at the Nameless Bar.

Driving to the Ithaca Beer Company

Head south on New York State Route 13 and you’ll hit that corner of Ithaca that is not so gorges, the big-box store section that bitters Ithaca’s malty, easy-going local sweetness. Industrial parks and strip malls; Wal-Mart, Lowes, Kohls, Midas, Barnes & Noble, McDonalds, Wendy’s, Friendly’s, Burger King. Grey buildings with bright signs line the banks of this gently snaking river of commercialism, a reminder that that Ithaca is, after all, just another American town. Sure, you’ll pass by local staples Manos Diner and the recently closed Smart Monkey Café, but you’re not in The Commons anymore, Toto.

Commercialism ends with The Home Depot on your right as you cross the threshold of a robin-blue bridge just before Buttermilk Falls State Park. Here the road straightens out and the speed limit jumps to 40 miles per hour as industry gives way to countryside. Heading toward Elmira, the road can’t seem to decide between one and two lanes, and there is no sense in swerving to avoid potholes – you’ll just hit another anyway.

Continue straight at the stoplight for the 13A spur, and the two southbound lanes merge, uniting just after the entrance to the Ithaca Beer Company.

Three Stories of Gershom Gorenberg

2010-03-04T21:32:00.006-05:00

Story One

"It's because I'm an Israeli journalist. If I were an Israeli heart surgeon they wouldn't be asking me this things."

I was eavesdropping on Gershom Gorenberg, the U.S.-born Jerusalem-based journalist who describes himself as a "left-wing, skeptical Orthodox Zionist Jew." He was speaking with Rebecca Lesses, a recently-tenured (deservedly so) professor of Jewish Studies following a supper Q&A with journalism majors and Ithaca College faculty.

This actually happened. I was reading an excerpt of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, an ethically questionable work. Capote didn't use tape recorders - claimed he could memorize everything. I can't. But I don't make up scenes either.

I was invited through Todd Schack via Jeff Cohen to attend this supper - wraps and pasta salad and cookies in swanky Park 220. It was an intimate affair: nine students, Gorenberg, and a handful of professors.

Israel. That's the magic word, isn't it? That's the powder keg of P.C., the sweating spotlit character on the world stage.

The first question was reductionist - which is fitting, as journalists by nature have to reduce things, distill them, boil them down to their most essential elements. This was the essence of the question: are American Jewish supporters of Israel supporting it on religious, nationalistic, or ethnic terms?

Gorenberg had just been discussing the intricacies of Israel. It's a nation, a religious nation, and Jews have traditionally identified themselves (and been identified by others) as an ethnic group. You can't separate them - they are all part of the identity.

But that was nothing compared to the question that came from Matt Mogweku, associate professor and chair of the journalism department. Like I said, I didn't record it. But this is the gist of what he said:

"When I was a boy growing up" (hand gesture to denote his height at this age) "I always wanted to visit Israel. Some people say, 'I want to go to Paris before I die.' I said, 'I want to go to Israel so I can die happy.' If I can go to Jerusalem..." (puffs out cheeks, denoting the grandeur of such a possibility). "But as I got older, and I began to read the news..." (rambles a bit). "I don't want to offend anyone here, but I started learning about Israel and nuclear weapons, and I thought, 'what is the difference between Israel and Iran?' I haven't seen any U.S. journalists or Israeli journalists writing about the question of nuclear weapons. I would like to know why no one is writing about this."

The essence of Gorenberg's response: Israeli journalists write about this every day.

But it was pursued more, and Gorenberg's frustration was evident, though he maintained his composure very well. Clearly he did not anticipate being put in the hot spot.

Then there were the questions about American journalists and Israel, even though Gorenberg said multiple times he did not frequently read American new sources. If you want news about Israel, you should read Israeli sources, because they don't get bogged down in reiterating the history of the issue, sacrificing precious words.

You might be thinking now, "Wait, Chris, you love it when journalists put people in the hot seat." That's true, but only when they do so fairly. Essentially Gorenberg was being asked to respond for Israel's government. Or being grouped with Israel and railed against. It is not Gorenberg that made these policies, and if you want to ask him about his views on it, you should ask him, rather than accuse him without reference to his writing or personal belief.

Story Two

Gorneberg then delivered a lecture in Emerson Suites to a small but attentive audience.

Images like the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Mosque are symbols. It doesn't matter if important religious events ever happened there, because everyone "knows" that the did. The place is the composite of everything that ever "happened" there.

Also, the location cannot be called by neutral terms because any term used to describe it will instill the values of the describer. Al-Aqsa has the Muslim connotation, Temple Mount the Jewish. My corollary: "PSQ" will have an American, or at least English-language connotation with an English alphabet. It will be given by an outsider, like "Holy Land," which is only holy to the Big Three.

In any case, stories are what matter, because stories are what give our symbols meaning.

P.S. Before the Q&A portion, an announcement was made that all those that would like to discuss Israel politics without asking a question should do so on the Internet. Good call.

Story Three

Gorenberg closed this this beautiful story from the Bereishit Rabba, a midrash on Genesis. (Midrash is something of a rabbinic interpretation, but because of space considerations, and because I am a reductionist journalist, I will not discuss it here. I encourage you, however, to check out the Itche Kadoozy Show for all your questions on Judaism.)

This version of the same story of What Cain said unto Abel in Genesis 4:8 appears over at YU Torah Online.

And Cain Spoke unto Abel his brother.

About what did they quarrel?

“Come,” said they, “let us divide the world.” One took the land and the other took the movables. The former said, “The land you stand on is mine,” while the latter retorted, “What you are wearing is mine….”

R. Joshua of Sikhnin said in R. Levi’s name: “Both took land and both took movables, but about what did they quarrel? One said, ‘The Temple must be built in my area,’ while the other claimed, ‘It must be built in mine.’”

Judah b. Rabbi said, “Their quarrel was about the first Eve.” Said R. Aibu: “The first Eve had returned to dust.” Then about what was their quarrel? Said R. Huna, “An additional twin was born with Abel and each claimed her. The one claimed: ‘I will have her, because I am the first born,’ while the other maintained, ‘I must have her because she was born with me.’”

"It is appealing to suggest that this Midrash is portraying not just the specific dispute between Cain and Abel but from a universal perspective, presenting three reasons why wars break out.

"One reason is an economic one.
"A second reason concerns issues of power.
"A third reason is the religious one. Who will have the right to claim the Temple?"

Who will have the right to claim the Temple?

Trivia at the Nameless Bar

2010-02-28T20:36:00.004-05:00

For my Narrative Journalism class. 22 February 2010

“What’s it gonna be then, eh?”

There was me, that is Chris, and two women I’d never met before, that is Stephanie and Ann, and we sat in a booth of a warm nameless bar racking our brains on a Monday night, a flip dark chill winter flurry. The nameless bar is an indie sort of place, and you may, O my brothers, remember what this place was once called, Korova, though its name is no more, things being what they are…

- - -

Trivia night. Standing room only. A hundred people simultaneously strain to remember the name of Gargamel’s cat from The Smurfs. “It’s a light night,” remarks Stephanie, setting down her Flower Power IPA. “I think it’s because Cornell has midterms.” Most other nights finding a seat is no problem. Not Mondays, especially not after 9:30.

Teams of hip young locals and graduate students in groups of three to eight discuss answers around slips of paper and half-filled pint glasses. Guys wear tight pants, sweaters and fedoras, t-shirts and trucker hats, their hair and beards kept just-so. Girls wear pea coats and plaid shirts, tunics, simple dresses with leggings, thick-framed glasses. One boundary-bending individual rocks a t-shirt, skirt and Birkenstocks. He looks comfortable.

The most professionally-dressed woman is also the oldest. Straight from the office where she practices internal medicine, Ann is clad in a gray skirt, navy blouse and navy dress jacket. She has wavy ear-length gray hair and blue eyes shine out from behind her thin gold-rimmed glasses. She’s probably in her mid-fifties. Across the booth sits her daughter’s best friend, Stephanie, a 2009 Cornell graduate who tells me she doesn’t want to be a nanny the rest of her life. Usually the two play in a group of three to four, but everyone was busy tonight, so they invited me, a complete stranger, to join them.

We are seated in a cushy brown booth in the back of the bar, next to a series of abstract canvases in brown, blue and white that might represent barren hills in cool morning mist. The rest of the golden-orange walls are adorned with spot-lit “Dreamland” comics of local cartoonist Jim Garmhausen, featuring disembodied arms, grinning anthropomorphic ponies, and bestiality involving dolphins. In one a leprous-looking boy is confronted by his teacher: “Let me guess, Zombie Boy. The dog ate your hand, right?” Art shows rotate through every six weeks – though no one seems to be paying much attention to these surreal monochromatic musings.

Across the room is the coat check – a closet with a window cut out – occupied by a sarcastic wit drinking something dark from a pilsner glass. That’s Bob.

Between rounds of trivia Bob plays the latest indie rock on his iPod and tallies scores for teams like That’s not Mickey Mouse, that’s tit dirt; Temple Grandin can choke my chicken; and I thought the last team name was offensive. (pause) Me too. The last one gives him a chuckle. “I’ve never had someone write me stage directions before,” Bob muses.

Stephanie and Ann have a year and a half of trivia experience between the two of them, but have only won once.
“We won on December 28,” Ann says, stirring her gin and tonic.
“I wrote it down!” Stephanie chimes in.
“She framed the money she won.”
Stephanie nods sheepishly. “I did. But then I spent it.”

Into which ocean does the Zambezi River flow? That’s easy – the Indian. What part of France did the allied forces invade on D-Day? Normandy. “That was back when we fought one war at a time, dammit,” Bob says in a mocking paternal tone. A tough one: On which day of the year are hot cross buns traditionally eaten? “If you think about it, it should make sense,” Bob informs the bar.

The three of us decide it has to have something to do with Easter. “I did see hot cross buns at Wegmans this weekend,” Ann ponders aloud. Mardi Gras, then. That was Tuesday, and Catholics fast on Wednesday. We’re surprised when the answer is Good Friday. No team gets it right.

- - -

Some different trivia: The bar is nameless. Outside in the yellow light of The Commons, a sandwich board declares in subway graffiti scrawl, “BAR.” Beneath in chalk: “TRIVIA – OPEN @ 7 PM.” Another graffiti sign at the entrance invites passers-by to try one of “Seventeen Rotating Drafts.” Apartments on the left and above are clearly marked, as is the ever-popular Taste of Thai restaurant next door. But what to call this place?

Once upon a time patrons entered the tavern under a stylized black, white and yellow sign reading “Korova.” Russian for “cow,” the name might recall for some the “Korova Milk Bar” of Anthony Burgess’s novel “A Clockwork Orange” or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. In any case, the name was too similar for the owners of “The Korova Milk Bar®” in White Plains, New York, which prides itself on an “interior right out of the movie.” Last year a legal dispute over the use of the name forced the Ithaca bar to remove the sign, leaving a white rectangular scar on the gray brick exterior. But come on – everyone knows this is still Korova.

It’s not “The Korova” or “The Korova Milkbar,” but “Korova,” the one where the pinball machine, dart boards, Megatouch video game and photo booth all remain unused as patrons chat or do homework or play Scrabble or Sorry! with friends over a craft beer and endless bowls of Chex Mix.

It is the craft beer that attracts the clientele, Tim the bartender explained to me earlier in the evening. The chalkboard graffiti draft list consists mostly of full-bodied craft and international brews: Smuttynose Robust Porter, Delirium Tremens, Southern Tier Crème Brûlée Stout.

“That’s our niche,” Tim says. And then what seems like a non sequitur: “We target ourselves at grad students and locals. We’re not trying to exclude undergrads, but with the kinds of beers we serve…” What he means is that at $4.50 a draft, there are more economical ways to drink. These are, in his words, “premium beers.” “We’re trying to create a lounge atmosphere without the food,” Tim says.

They have bottles, too, listed under more graffiti scrawl. Want a Budweiser? Sorry, but try a Red Stripe or Pabst Blue Ribbon (also available in cans!). Want a light beer? You have one choice: Labatt Blue Light. Want a Corona? Okay, they actually do serve that. For the most part, though, it’s an indie bar playing indie music and serving indie brews.

- - -

“Azrael.” That’s the name of Gargamel’s cat, the archangel of death. And to think I thought it was Lucifer.

After three rounds, That’s not Mickey Mouse, that’s tit dirt emerges victorious and the bar begins to empty out the door into the building snowstorm. Bartenders pick up empty glasses say goodbye to the departing crowd.

“Just so you know,” comes Bob’s voice over the chatter, “the winning group is donating their winnings to Doctors Without Borders.”

Amid the noise a girl’s voice cries, “Fuck this bullshit!”

Bob gets his last quip of the night: “That girl right there hates Haiti! And doctors! And she wants you to know about it!”

Observational Writing

2010-02-23T08:48:00.004-05:00

For my Narrative Journalism course, I had to go somewhere and sit there for an hour, just observing the things that went on. I could not place myself in the piece, could not analyze the action, could only write about the place and what was happening. I think I managed with perhaps one or two tiny exceptions.

I'll let you figure out the location and style by yourself. I hope you enjoy!

- - -

Cream sign, chocolate border, chocolate lettering:

15A
Cereal Peanut Butter
Oatmeal Syrup

Rainbow boxes lit by white gym lights hanging from clay-colored rafters. White red blue red white green yellow orange red red…Small print: ENLARGED TO SHOW TEXTURE. Giant flakes and puffs.

GOLEAN Stay Fuller Longer!*

Silent weaving brown cart, double basket, moves with authority – purpose. Propelled by man in a leather jacket and red baseball cap.

“Where’s Travis?”
“I don’t know. I thought he was with you.” Cart swoops back.

Clop clop clop high heels clop. Squish-squish squish-squish: white, wet, sticky-soled sneakers.

You found me, you found me

Red box: Kellogg’s Product 19. $3.99 12 oz. (340g) Unit Price $5.32 per pound.

grunnnNNN Forward facing wheels slide laterally gruuuunN on terrazzo composition vinyl tiles. Splotches of gray, shades of gray. Dirt gray on fake stone gray. Gray-brown splat near the Rice Krispies (carts went through as it dried, streaking it three feet outward).

Silent cart Silent feet

Sticky wheel and a cold: wadda wadda wadda *hem hem* wadda wadda

Woman in black: “I like blueberries.”
Man in blue: “I like blueberries.”

tah tah tah tah Silver cart, amber cardboard sixpack on bottom rack. War of 1812 Amber Ale. Chicken (pink on yellow), clementines (wooden box blue paper “Oh my darling!” orange net). Cart’s parked in front of granola bars, young man leaves in search of cereal.

Woman to child in cart: “We have Cheerios at home. We’re getting Cocoa Puffs.”

Track suit and Uggs, walking straight down the aisle. sh-dup sh-dup

007789016786
Unit Price $2.53
WEGMANS OATS & HONEY CEREAL
14.5 oz.
You Pay $2.29 (crossed out) consistent low prices You Pay $1.99.

“Do we need any cereals?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, we should get more granola bars.”
“Ha ha ha, you have gummies, mom.”
“We can’t have gummies.”

Nov 1010CNM WEGMANS CINNAMON SQUARES

Salt-and-pepper-haired man in a black North Face jacket, paper coffee cup held to shoulder, cell phone to ear: “I’m actually at Wegmans right now.”

HPC please call 200. HPC please call 200. Thank you.

Empty of all but bright colors and light music.

BOP! Ari please return to your register. Ari please return to your register.

Woman with dark short hair, slouched back, powder blue jacket, blue jeans. grunN – lateral cart wheels.
Blonde boy: “This should last for about a month.” Big blue box.
Powder blue jacket: “Okay, vat kind of bars do you vant?”
Brunet boy: “Can I have a Snickers bar?”
Powder blue jacket: “Luciano…”
Blonde boy: “Kool Aid?”
Powder blue jacket: “No Kool Aid”
Brunet boy: “Can we have Snickers bars?”

All we are we are

Man in shades of green and tan turns the corner, finds granola bars, places a box in his basket, turns on his heel and exits.

Brown Converse All-Stars with white laces. The man she’s with to his cell phone: “How long does it take you to get to New York City? Talk to Chester about that. I think Josie’s there right now – talk to Josie.”

Preserves: Cherry Pineapple Blackberry Strawberry Red Yellow Violet Red

Boy one is in a blue coat, mom’s in white, pushing boy two and the groceries. Boy one: “Oh mommy no wait. I want some can I have some.” “Okay put them in the cart.” Kacha

Pop Tarts: Blueberry Muffin, Apple Strudel, Cinnamon Roll, Vanilla Milkshake, S’Mores. Blue boxes: 8 Toaster Pastries.

“Oh that’s so cool oh that’s so cool.”
“That was really cool.”

Pancakes mixes, by shelf:
$2.49 $2.49 $2.49 $2.79
$1.99 $1.99
$2.29 $2.29 $3.29
$2.29 $2.29 $1.49 $2.39
$3.29 $3.29 $2.69 $2.69 $2.69
comparison shop? TOPS $2.99

Woman in orange sweatshirt, brown pants grabs Wegmans Butter-Flavored Syrup. “Gross.”

Say goodnight and go

Sunglasses in collar of a blue shirt, hands in jean pocket, red and white pumas, styled hair, scruff. Scrutinizes.
Why’d you have to be so cute? It’s impossible to ignore you
No cereal. “Let’s go”
Friend in navy yellow-piped jacket, white along the sides: “Find yourself some cereal.”
No answer.
“Maybe some Fruit Loops or some Fruity Pebbles. Get your colors.”

ayeeyeeyeeyeeyee iiiiiiiiIIIIeiaheiaheiaheiah loose wheel. Three whistled notes compete.
gruuuUN!

Foot-dragging boots tshi tshi tshi tshi.

SMART
START
Strong Heart
Whole-Grain Oats, Antioxidants & Low Sodium (& a heart-shaped bowl).

Whirra whirra Brown carts cross chrome carts.

psh psh Toe-first clog-walking, leaning on cart handle, brown winter parka swaying around knees.

Honey Nut Toasted Oats, shaken kish-a-kish-a-kish, replaced. New box a-kish placed in brown cart. Pause. Exit: green hat, brown suede jacket, jeans, sunglasses on hat.

I know where’ I’m goin’

Live blogging Tiger Woods' um, whatever it is.

2010-02-19T09:43:00.010-05:00

***Updated below with postscript***

10:20 AM - 40 Minutes Till Go

It's the event that no respectable journalist should attend: Tiger Woods' scripted, no-questions-allowed statement to 30 of his closest friends and few media outlets.

You might think that's not a lot of people, except it's televised. And the fact that Woods isn't answering questions there is no reason for anyone to really attend at all. Woods could have apologized in person to those people. It's a "pseudo-event." But he is apologizing to me, so unlike the Golf Writers Association of America, I'm bringing the media circus straight to you.

Woods has no reason to apologize to the public. As Richard Sandomir writes in the New York Times, "Woods did not sin against golf." He sinned against his partner and American institutions perhaps, but not his sport. It's the institutions part that I am fascinated by. Woods was seen as a safe bet for advertisers, a positive role model. So he lost his sponsorships and was vilified when a single affair (and over the next few days a harem) is exposed.

I love it. Compare it to Alexander Ovechkin, who is one of the dirtier players in the NHL, nice neither on nor off the ice. But kids somehow look past his transgressions because he is an amazing player:

(1:10 gives the best detail)

"But wait," you say, "the situations are completely different!" You're absolutely right! Woods transgressed on his own time. If there is any crossover between Woods' personal life and his sport, it is because of the entertainment-media-advertising complex. Woods plays great golf no matter who he has sex with.

Roy Peter Clark brings to light five great stories that should be done on Woods. In my opinion, these creative methods should be the only pieces done on Woods:

Woods as a prototype of Barack Obama, an African-American with light skin and a proper accent (cf. the oafish Harry Reid), deemed more acceptable to white America.
A description of the gender differences revealed by the reaction to the scandal: how women focused on disloyalty, while men seemed more concerned with the stupidity and recklessness that resulted in his getting caught.
A story on race and gender focused on the reaction of African American women to Tiger's apparent obsession with light-skinned, light-haired women.
Whether or not a wealthy celebrity like Tiger Woods can find justice within the legal system. Does his status get him a pass? Or does it attract harsher penalties?
The extent to which a double standard governs cases of spousal abuse. What if it were the Tiger swinging a club at his wife?

Those are good stories. This upcoming live blog...not so much.

*You might notice I refer to Tiger Woods as "Woods" throughout this post. That's because I don't know him on a first-name basis, as apparently a number of newscasters and writers do.

10:30 ESPN Pregame

The asshat is giving commentary on ESPN. He advocates taking six months off of golf ("we're only three months into it"). Says Woods is on step nine (of a ten-step program), but Woods is going back into rehab after this statement.

Reilly is very concerned with Woods' marriage and the people he surrounds himself with (in public). "We invested in his life," says Reilly: buying his products, believing in his school, etc. Yeah, but people invested in Enron as well. There is a risk to investing in anything.

Apparently women are the people that are the most disgusted by Woods's actions. And Nike? Woods should therefore go on Oprah and get interviewed by Diane Sawyer. Couch jumping, in fact, has been proven to endear strange-seeming men with astereotypical (yes, astereotypical) relationships.

Rick Reilly calls the man "Tiger." Josh Elliot calls him "Woods."

10:40

ABC News' John Berman interviewed. Go figure.

Sergio Garcia: "To tell you the truth, I'm really not that interested."

Golfers interviewed are more interested in Woods' professional life than personal life. Go figure.

10:50

SportsCenter Rundown: Tiger Woods Public Statement // Tiger Speaks Today // North and Reilly Live.
On now: Tiger and Galleries

10:54

How many William Blake knock-offs do you think have been written since Thanksgiving?

11:00

According to Randy Shilts in Patient Zero, The Wall Street Journal did not report on GRID (as it was called before the more correct term "AIDS" came into use) until the disease had a heterosexual angle. That's shameful on the part of the paper, but the newspaper does offer an interesting glance into the financial world. The Wall Street Journal lets us know what's on the minds of America's business people, with some hard-hitting news built in (through the lens of business, of course).

Things that matter this morning (headlines courtesy WSJ):

Tax Protestor Crashes Plane Into IRS Office
U.S. Bets Best Ally in [Afghanistan] Surge is Old One
[Interest] Rate Rise Stirs Questions
Obama Unveils Debt Panel - and GOP Is Likely to Join It
Soldiers Oust President in Coup in Uranium-Rich Niger
Somali Troops Gird for Battle With Militants
Fight Over Health-Care Premiums Heats Up
IAEA Suspects Iran Seeks Nuclear Arms
U.A.E. Probes a U.S. Tie in Killing of Hamas Figure
IMF Suggest Capital Controls for Emerging Markets
Pakistan Arrests Two Taliban Leaders
Dutch Nearing Afghan Pullout
Wal-Mart Warns of Soft Sales Ahead
Toyota's Chief Will Testify in Congress
Google Defends Its Books Pact
Regulators Clear Microsoft-Yahoo Alliance
Greece's Next Test Is in Bond Sale
Lewis Knew of Legal Decision
Obama Meets Dalai Lama Despite China's Ire

11:10

It is 31 degrees outside.

11:15

The shindig is over. Rick Reilly is coming on so the TV is turning off.

Fin.

1:45 Post Script

Okay, it seems I can't not talk about Woods. I was just talking with my roommate Jon about Woods' claim that Elin Nordegren did not ever harm him. Where did that report ever come from? TMZ? Oh. Reblogged by the...wait. Huffington Post?! Oh my. Oh, oh my.

I am surprised no one has advanced a Tyler Durden theory yet regarding Woods' injuries. Spread the word. But not too much - no one likes a media circus.

Rick Reilly is a Pompous Asshat

2010-02-16T23:34:00.007-05:00

[Can I say asshat on here? Is that okay?]

It's amazing. I write uncreative, self-serving drivel all the time and don't even get paid for it.

There was a time when Rick Reilly wrote about the little people in sports, the people you could learn lessons from. As a professor once told me, "Sports journalism is not about sports. It's a way of talking about everything else."

So I was disappointed when Rick Reilly sold out to ESPN for a five-year, $10 million contract. Ever since Reilly joined the Everything Sexist Pig Network, his writing has been uninspired (and at times, uh, repetitive), duller-than-bread-knife, more-arrogant-than-Kobe Bryant articles. This is not a dig at Kobe. When you're one of the best at what you do, you are allowed to be self-centered, especially when you're doing your job. The difference is Kobe, one of the best, getting 28 points a game. Rick Reilly, on the other hand, is getting paid $2 million a year to maybe make a foul shot when he's lucky.

Which brings me to my point: his foul shots against Canada.

His February 15 article, "Oh Canada" was depths below the standardized level of creativity and exceeded fivefold the amount of acceptable ass-hattery (I hope that phrase catches on). His writing does nothing but repeat Canadian stereotypes: They're nice. They are inferior to Americans. They live in the wild. They talk funny. They're great at curling. Where's the creativity? Check out the article. You'll see what I mean.

Reilly got some negative feedback for that article, so he wrote a second today in response, "Are We Having Fun Yet?" I read the whole thing with the Wicked Witch of the West's Voice in my head. The taunting, the sheer arrogance was that bad. Check it out. Seriously:

...Although I did like torchbearer Wayne Gretzky being taken to the lighting of the Official Olympic Giant Outdoor Reefers in the back of a pickup truck...That is what's known as a Canadian limo.

and

I would like to make up for it by awarding the following Canadian citizens gold in other disciplines: The Canadian Olympic women's hockey team, for beating Slovakia 18-0. Slovakia beat Bulgaria 82-0 almost two years ago in pre-Olympic qualifying. Eighty-two to nothing! Suck on that, Slovakia! How's it feel? Canuck women rule!

Wait, I actually don't understand what that one means. Who is he speaking to?

[Still giving out medals] The Canadian fans who wait more than four hours at Robson Square to ride a 30-second zip line. And they wait happily! And they say "sore-ee" when they bump elbows accidentally! Do they realize they could build their own 30-second zip-line ride in four hours?

I once waited 3 hours to ride a ride at Six Flags. Golly, I wish there was something else I could have done to simulate falling like that...Oh wait.

How does he get off with this stuff? It's drivel about a little drizzle. Like Canadians control the weather! If I wanted to read some boring, inconsequential piece about what an awful time someone is having, I would have checked out fmylife.com. And that site doesn't even have to pay its writers four digits a day.

Interested in more? Check out FireRickReilly.com. Their analysis of this issue is far better than mine.

Introducing Team USA

2010-02-03T18:48:00.006-05:00

I thought wasps died in the winter.

Oh, those WASPS. Silly me. And that's not completely true. Only the drones do. The queens hibernate until spring.

According to Yahoo Sports, Team USA just revealed its outfits for the winter games opening ceremonies. And I quote: "Inspired by designs worn during the 1932 Lake Placid Winter Olympics, these outfits are so American they basically play Bruce Springsteen songs." That got me really excited. I imagined something rugged, like jeans and an undershirt. Maybe some flannel to keep out the cold. You know, Springsteen attire. Cool, I thought, Ralph Lauren is about to stand for the common man! Imagine my shock when I saw the designs.

Check this one out:

Is that logo big enough? Seriously. It looks like the First Horse of the Apocalypse, come to conquer us all.

If you have $385 to spend on a cardigan, you too can look like a U.S. athlete in the Winter Olympics. $325 for the opening ceremony jacket.

Of course, this is just continuing the tradition of dressing for prep school. And really, I'm not even sure why I am complaining about athletes and promotions. Apolo Ohno will be getting a good night's sleep thanks to NyQuil. Maybe he will eat McDonalds and drink Coca-Cola, or at least pretend to. He will be wearing Nike. So will curlers. Bobsledders will be wearing UnderArmour.

So be sure to catch all the action on NBC and buy GE appliances! Oh, and be sure to check out Universal's The Wolfman on opening day, February 12!

Hourly Comic Day 2010

2010-02-02T10:18:00.009-05:00

Happy belated Hourly Comic Day! Yesterday, Monday February 1, people drew a comic every hour to chronicle their life. It combines all the self-absorption of Twitter with the fun of online comics!

I learned about this through John Campbell's comic, Pictures for Sad Children. It is one of my favorite web dailies. He did an hourly comic for every day of January, ending February 1. From his site:

i wanted to see what it would be like if journal comics were a little more detailed and also monotonous. it helps me see where my life has been ("nowhere") and where my life is going (probably also "nowhere")

On that note, here's my day.

Quote of the Day

2010-01-30T17:13:00.003-05:00

"When a person is twenty-one or twenty-two years old and facing that great enigma about what to do, envying the law students or medical students who can get on a set of rails and run on it and know where they're going, the writer doesn't know. But a writer should also bear in mind there are numerous paths to this goal and they're all O.K. It's like a huge river with a lot of islands in it. You can go around an island to the left or right. You can go to this or that island. You might get into an eddy. But you're still in the river. You're going to get there. If the person expects the big answers at twenty-one, that's ridiculous. Everyone's in the dark."
-John McPhee, quoted in Literary Journalism by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer

Speaking of writing, Practicing Writing is a great blog featuring tips and opportunities for writers (h/t to Kate).

Amazing Grace

2010-01-29T13:45:00.006-05:00

Update below

At least one newspaper is doing well. Sort of. For a moment.

Is the iPad newspapers' saving grace? It's even the focus of Doonesbury comics this week.

We have two-thirds of a perfect storm right now simultaneously being explored by Gary Trudeau and others. The first is the New York Times' online "paywall." The second is the iPad.

Pay dirt (as in what I pay right now)
That's right, the New York Times will soon begin charging for access after a certain number of articles. No more all-you-can-eat buffet without a subscription. Welcome to news a la carte.

Apparently Newsday has had great success with this. Hah.

Having to pay to access any online story would hurt a lot of amateur bloggers like me because one, my audience doesn't necessarily subscribe to every newspaper, and two, my income does not at the moment support me subscribing to every online news source I read. Luckily, though, it's unlikely that free online news will ever go away. It will probably just change forms.

Check out the Nieman Journalism Labs' paywall widget.

iWhat?
Did you see the iPad? I saw the iPad. It looks like a big iPod Touch. It's "magical and revolutionary" at an "unbelievable price." But I believe the price.

The Big Money writes that a key to Apple's success is its antisocial attitude. This is true, but there is another factor as well.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee
MacWorld predicts that newspapers and magazines will benefit from portable e-readers. Just think: all the news, no physical production cost. Just lay it out in a digital format and you're good to go. The downside to this is that Apple will undoubtedly try to sell subscriptions through iTunes, meaning that Apple will be getting a cut of the hard work that newspapers do. (For ha-has: I link freely to articles, and you get added commentary!)

While this can save "print" (err, let's work on another name for that) publications, it will give Apple greater power over media. Apple is saving newspapers, and it's doing a much better job than the federal government did when it saved America's "cannot fail" institutions. Those institutions were given fairly free rein. Apple is holding newspapers by the lede. A better model for newspapers would allow you to subscribe directly through the publication's website, bypassing Apple entirely. But Apple wants to control the media because its device will be expensive. Worst case scenario for us/best case scenario for Apple: People will buy cheaper e-readers, but it will only be iPad users that can download the content they want. Let's hope it never comes to this

Update 6:30: I was just discussing this with my friend Anthony, who is an English major. His greatest concern is for the book publishing industry. The same logic applies regarding Apple's control of media. The difference is that book publishing has not lost revenue due to declining readership and a loss of advertising.

Two Poems

2010-01-19T23:33:00.003-05:00

These I just rediscovered.

As they were written many months apart, I didn't intend both these poems to feature Buddhism, animals and death. But they do. I hope you enjoy.

I hope the mayfly I just killed was Buddhist

Death by newsprint –
the business section eclipsed the table lamp’s
mirthless glow as a story on Citgo’s Venezuela
trouble hit hard an unintended audience.

Perhaps he was meditating on death
or fashioning tiny mayfly prayer flags
from stray banana peel fibers,
which he’d dole out to other Buddhist mayflies

to place wherever Buddhist mayflies’ prayers need saying.
I’d like to think the life I took
just might have had a prayer
because Buddhist flies get another chance.

A mayfly’s samsara:
eat shit and mate.

I would have sent an incarnation onward as a station
on Nirvana Railways, giving it a second or third
hundredth shot at bodhi, which for Buddhist mayflies
is realized simply one day at time.

- - -

“The Badgers are on fire!”

Billy’s callin’ – I let it ring
because I know he’s watching
the Wisconsin game too, and wishes
to discuss the ten unanswered points,
and the announcer’s absurd observation.

I wonder if they’re worried, the badgers,
confronted with their abruptly
existential condition, combusting spontaneously like
frantic badger-shaped logs soaked in kerosene,
sputtering like stuntmen or popping like prop jobs,
these also on fire.

Or are they transcendent little furry burning monks,
tranquil as a phoenix in its last moments aflame
with foreknowledge of impending rebirth?

I imagine shouts of “FIRE!” in the Kohl Center –
spectacle of the unexpected. Still the squeak
of high tops, the quickening cadence
of leather on maple continues
as the home team smokes its competition.
Bucky bravely stands, sentinel on the sidelines,
mascot-ed head immersed in a Gatorade cooler.

In defense of pantheism

2010-01-16T17:49:00.003-05:00

A couple weeks ago I went to see Fern Gulley III: Pandora's Cry in 3D IMAX. You can imagine my disappointment when they instead showed James Cameron's Avatar.

Yes, Hollywood loves pantheism, but what some do not understand is that pantheism is a legitimate religious outlook. Ross Douthat's December Op-Ed column in the New York Times used James Cameron's Avatar as a launching point to decry pantheism as a religion. His argument is pretty weak. He would be better off arguing that people should consider pantheism more carefully before dismissing it as a legitimate religion entirely.

Douthat opens with a definition of pantheism and its relation to Avatar:

“Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

So far so good. His definition is pretty accurate, if short to fit in print. He then gets into the requirements of a religion:

The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

To a degree, I accept this proposal, but I would tone it down to accommodate all religions, not just the Abrahamic ones. Let's replace the violent imagery of a crusading spirit with message. Yes, those are different things, killing with the goal of spreading your religion does not legitimate it. In fact, you don't even need to spread your religion in order to make it legitimate. In fact, the crusading spirit should probably be disregarded outright. But I digress. Let's trade the thou shalt nots for philosophy. Let's exchange eschatology (view of the "end time," whether this is communal or personal) for piping-hot apocalypse.

Let's take a look at pantheism.

Message: We are all of this earth.
Philosophy: Respect life. Find your balance.
Eschatology: You will die and rot. If you have a soul, it will even return to the "all." But don't expect singing angels.

Okay. Now we can all speak together productively about this. But Douthat doubts that pantheism deserves a voice:

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

The comparison is absurd. The problem of evil that monotheisic religions deal with is very difficult to argue, and imbues the religion with a great deal of mystery. By Douthat's logic, pantheism is not a legitimate religion because the causes of suffering and death are accounted for. Wait, a religion with an empiracally-provable philosophy? Why haven't we all hopped onboard? Douthat is blinded by monotheistic eschatology such that he thinks the only religion worth having is one with a parent-child relationship: if you eat all your food and are a good little boy, you'll get ice cream for dessert. He can't imagine a religion without that happy ending: "Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms [of death and decay]."

Whereas monotheistic religion promises heaven, Douthat argues, pantheism presents a "downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago." Pantheism does not hope for a future of bliss, but it does have an eschatology of individual death, which is really communal death, as everything on earth is subject to death and decay. Further, Douthat perceives a "re-merger with the natural world" to be feeble as compared to today's robust monotheistic religions. Anyone who takes a course in philosophy knows that the "appeal to belief" is fallacious. Any number of people believing X does not make X true.

Douthat concludes, "But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back." Wait, let me try this from the other side. "But except four our souls, the existence of which has not been proven, the all-benevolent creator whose existence has not been proven cannot take us back." In either case, a person is retuning to something he or she believed in. I believe that's what faith is.

Fuse!

2010-01-13T22:05:00.003-05:00

I've got some new work up on the Fuse website:

The Calculus of Climate Change
Running in Place
Slapshots of Bob Driscoll
Mustache + November = Movember

Also, the 2010 winter issue of Fuse, Ithaca College's prospective student magazine, is out. I've got a couple articles in there, and I was the student editor for "Dig It." Check it out on Issuu.

Losing late-night laughs?

2010-01-11T14:36:00.006-05:00

It feels good to be back. We've got a great show for you tonight.

I'm not sure if you've heard of NBC'snew reality/drama/puzzle concept, titled "Swapping Times." I'm a little sketchy on the details, but I think it has something to do with moving around nighttime talk shows to get more viewers. There's even the possibility of getting voted off the network if your ratings aren't good enough. That's some great programming.

I tried to do little research, but strangely was having problems with viewing the NBC.com clips featured on the HuffingtonPost website: "Conan Skewers NBC in Monologue" and "Leno Canceled? Jay Jokes About Rumors in Monologue."

Whenever I tried to play the videos in Firefox or Safari, the browser shuts down about 15 seconds in. Then I tried to play the whole Jay Leno show on his website, which also froze Firefox. It seemed awfully suspicious on NBC's part, but it turns out it was just a bad boot.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Stick around, we've got a great show for you tonight. Sometime.

Two things

2009-11-03T16:55:00.003-05:00

One:
It's good to see CNN is filling the 24-hour newshole with legitimate news.

Two:
It's quite amazing how many articles featured on the Drudge Report reference other "articles" the Drudge Report broke.
Original Story: "Barack 'N Bones"
Telegraph followup: "Has President Obama Lost Weight?"
Daily Mail followup: "Is 'Barack n Bones' Obama thin as a rail because he's skipping too many meals to run the country?"

Also: Gatorade is not an energy drink. It's a sports drink.

A Delicate Balance (Spinning Plates)

2009-10-08T00:41:00.004-04:00

When this just feels like spinning plates -
I'm living in cloud cuckoo land.
And this just feels like spinning plates -
Our bodies floating down the muddy river.
-Radiohead, "Like Spinning Plates"

It's been a hellacious semester so far between taking 18 credits (including an English honors thesis), rowing and writing for my new job with Fuse Magazine. Oh, and applying to Teach for America (I've been invited to a day-long interview mid-October).

Next week is fall break, meaning a few things:

The semester's halfway done(!?)
I can catch up on sleep and work
HEAD OF THE CHARLES!

Next semester I should be taking fewer credits, which may mean I can actually resume regular updates.

Late-Breaking

2009-09-13T21:58:00.003-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I'm really surprised this story is headlining HuffPo right now.

This was news, what, in March, right?

Worth Checking Out

2009-08-12T15:26:00.002-04:00

Check out this moving video. It's a great example of journalism - no editorializing, just stating the facts. A wonderful example of what can be done with a video camera, some editing software and the desire to tell a story.

Via Fact-Esque via NewsRackBlog via Reuters.

Reductio ad Hitlerum

2009-08-08T08:33:00.003-04:00

As the L.A. Times' Brendan Bigelow points out in his blog, Rush Limbaugh's latest tirade on Obama's healthcare plan falls prey to what is known as Godwin's Law, or as a philosopher would say, Reductio ad Hitlerum.

The pictures do have a certain similarity to them. But if we follow the argument that anything that looks like Nazi symbolism somehow itself embodies the spirit of Nazism, we must accept that Buddha was a Nazi. Look at that, he ripped the Nazi symbol off of Hitler. Peaceful religion, my ass.

Actually, that argument is also fallacious. Rather, since Siddhartha Gautama preceded Adolph Hitler, it stands to reason that Adolph Hitler was actually a Buddhist because he adopted Buddhist symbolism.

But actually neither of these is true because the argument is inherently flawed. Different societies have used similar symbols throughout history to signify different things. Just because two symbols are similar does not mean they signify the same idea.

You know what is disturbing? Obama's branding. Check out BarackObama.com and everywhere you go, that little circle of hope, symbolizing the American flag, or fields of grain, or the Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. This thing is like HAL 9000, silently eying your every move, ready at any time to demonstrate that you are not actually in control of this Democracy. I'm afraid I can't let you do that, America.

2001 A Space Odyssey - Hal 9000 part 2
by non-humain

Right above I was starting down the slippery slope that Rush Limbaugh has already slipped down into the icy recesses of fallacy. But here's my problem: brand consciousness plays such a large role in this country, and it's scary to see that the president of the United States has his own brand image. We're not talking the Seal or something that every president has, this is unique to Obama himself.

Sure politicians run on brands, but their imagery is nowhere near as ubiquitous after the election as is Obama's. The Obama brand is the Starbucks logo of politics, just as easily recognized and just as easily lampooned. Branding is for the easy recognition of products, but presidents get the Seal. Obama's logo is unnecessary, unless he wants to license official Obama-wear products. And that should not be happening.

Adventures in Videography

2009-08-05T21:00:00.001-04:00

Click for larger

Wednesday Links

2009-08-05T15:18:00.005-04:00

Ithaca Times: Breaking New Ground
All interviews were done in a two and a half-hour span Monday evening. If there hadn't been a dinner mishap, it might have been done by midnight. I think, however, that it's the best piece I have ever written at 5:00 in the morning.

Ithaca Times: Higher Education
Ever wondered how college town economy like Ithaca's differentiates and even insulates it from the outside? It's a question I've been asking myself very frequently as of late.

Cake
The eco-friendly, human rights-friendly band gives away cherry tree saplings at its shows. Check out the "News" and "Weekly" sections for random and/or insightful tidbits on music, politics, religion, food and science. No RSS feed, but this is one to keep an eye on.

The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna
Apparently "dolphin safe" also means "everything else in danger." (via Cake)

After Last Season
This is a real movie. People have seen it.

A Piece of History
Why yes, the Ithaca Times does have me do advertorials. This is probably the only one I've enjoyed doing. It's owned by a really nice couple, former Ithaca professors.

The Campbell Brothers
I have heard the gospel, and I believe. But seriously, I'd buy a CD if I was not working on a preview article on them. I've learned recently that MySpace is actually a great way to discover new music and listen to it for free.

I Love College

2009-08-03T11:36:00.002-04:00

Just posted a review of Nyle's "Capstone EP" on popcorn youth. Also featured is a musing on college-educated rappers, which I might work into an article some day.

If you haven't seen it yet, check this out:

Nyle "Let The Beat Build" from Nyle on Vimeo.

That's one continuous shot. Take 30.

Done Blogging the U23 World Rowing Championships

2009-07-27T12:38:00.002-04:00

U-23 Worlds coverage straight from the horse's mouth.

USRowing.

Comprehensive coverage on World Rowing.

Result list on World Rowing.

Blogging the U23 World Rowing Championships Day 4

2009-07-26T10:24:00.002-04:00

The U.S. Under-23 crew received three silver medals today at the U23 World Rowing Championships in Racice, Czech Republic. Our hero, Pete Orlando, and his crew in the lightweight quadruple sculls placed third in the B-level finals, or 9th overall.

In a race that saw many lead-changes, the U.S. quad was notably consistent. Never more than two seconds behind the lead boat, they pulled near even splits: 1:30, 1:30, 1:32, 1:30. That last split especially helped them pull ahead of Spain in the last 500 meters as Spain pulled roughly a 1:32 for fourth. Denmark finished first in a 6:00.76. Sweden was just 0.14 seconds behind in a 6:00.90. U.S.A. finished third with a 6:02.72.

It's been a long journey for Pete and his buddies. I'm sure they will be updating their blog soon. Congratulations on racing with the world's finest young rowers!

Othere U.S. News
After sitting third through the first half of the race, the defending champion U.S. women's eight charged ahead in the second 1,000 meters to beat out Poland and challenge Great Britain. Their sprint was not quite enough, though, and they finished 1.09 behind Great Britain, which posted a 6:20.71. Poland came in third.

The lightweight women's quadruple sculls was consistent throughout, with Germany winning, USA coming in second and Australia pulling in third.

After being down for the first 1,500 meters, the U.S. men's four charged through their sprint to improve from fourth place to second. New Zealand finished first and Germany third.

After a close first 500, the field separated in the women's four, seeing team USA struggle for position but ultimately fall to sixth. Belarus came in first, Italy second and New Zealand third.

B-level finals:
The lightweight men's four came in fourth in the B-level final, or 10th overall.

The lightweight women's double sculls finished sixth in the B-level final, or 12th overall

The women's single sculls came in second in the B-level final, or eighth overall.

In other news...
The men's eight final was remarkable in that the field was more condensed at the 1,000 meter mark than they were at the 500! (1.75 second spread from 1st to 6th vs. 3.99 seconds). The incredibly close field saw Poland jump to the lead for its only first-place finish. Poland turned a .64 deficit on Great Britain at 1,000 meters into a .70 second lead by 1,500. Poland and Germany then executed blistering sprints to edge out Britain, which finished third in 5:35.25. Germany finished second in 5:34.11 and Poland first with a 5:32.77.

World Rowing Web site here.
Full results from World Rowing here [.pdf].
USRowing will most likely update results Monday.

Blogging the U23 World Rowing Championships Day 3 (cont'd)

2009-07-26T09:57:00.004-04:00

Complete Results from Saturday:

The U.S. men’s four came in third in its semifinal to advance to the A-level finals Sunday. It joins the women's pair, lightweight women's quadruple sculls, women's four, men's four with coxswain and women's eight in medal position.

Finishers:
LW1x 4th of six in C-level finals
LM1x 5th of 6 in D-level finals
M1x 3rd of six in C-level finals
LM2- 2nd of three in B-level finals
W2x 4th of four in B-level finals
LM2x 6th of sic in C-level finals
M2x 2nd of four in C-level finals
W4x 3rd of three in B-level finals
M4x 5th of five in C-level finals
M8+ 1st of three in B-level finals

Level Finals:
W1x [B]
LW2x [B]
LM4- [B]
M4- [A]
LM4x [B]

Crews in Medal Position:
W2-
LW4x
W4-
M4+
W8+

Blogging the U23 World Rowing Championships Day 3

2009-07-25T09:32:00.004-04:00

Just a quick update now with full results later.

In today's second semifinal, the U.S. lightweight men's quad today off in last place but by the halfway mark had moved all the way to fourth. At the end, they were just 1.72 seconds away from making the A-level finals. The boat will compete in the B-level finals tomorrow.

Team USA made up an amazing deficit in the second 500, pulling a 1:27.32, more than 2 seconds better than their previous split, and the second-best overall split for the second 500, behind Germany. By the third 500 the U.S. was within .57 seconds of third-place France, but could not respond to France's sprint. France ended up posting a 1:28.77 split for the fourth 500, the fastest of that quarter.

The U.S. crew will face Denmark, Turkey, Czech Republic, Spain and Sweden in the B-level finals. From the times posted, it looks like the U.S. boat has a good shot at first in the B-level finals, or 7th place overall. Break an oar, guys!

The A-level finals will consist of Italy, Hungary, Great Britain, Germany, Russia and France.

Here are the results from World Rowing:

Semifinal 1:

Nation 1 ITA	500m 1:25.54 (1)	1,000m 2:52.77 (1)	1,500m 4:21.12 (1)	Finish 5:49.69	Lane 4
2 HUN	1:26.01 (2)	2:54.26 (2)	4:24.51 (2)	5:53.70	5
3 GBR	1:26.30 (3)	2:55.67 (3)	4:25.25 (3)	5:54.73	3
4 CZE	1:26.75 (4)	2:57.44 (4)	4:29.64 (4)	6:02.60	6
5 ESP	1:28.00 (5)	2:58.88 (5)	4:31.40 (5)	6:04.85	1
6 SWE	1:28.46 (6)	3:00.47 (6)	4:34.64 (6)	6:06.79	2

Semifinal 2:

Nation 1 GER	500m 1:25.96 (1)	1,000m 2:53.02 (1)	1,500m 4:22.26 (1)	2,000m 5:51.37	Lane 3
2 RUS	1:27.89 (3)	2:56.18 (2)	4:25.19 (2)	5:54.59	4
3 FRA	1:26.97 (2)	2:56.37 (3)	4:26.27 (3)	5:55.04	2
4 USA	1:29.91 (6)	2:57.23 (4)	4:26.84 (4)	5:56.76	5
5 DEN	1:28.65 (4)	2:59.05 (5)	4:30.86 (5)	6:00.98	1
6 TUR	1:29.32 (5)	3:00.49 (6)	4:36.65 (6)	6:11.63	6

"Political Shenanigans": New Jersey is a Caricature of Itself

2009-07-24T18:45:00.006-04:00

"Massive N.J. Corruption Sting Targets Mayors, Legislators, Rabbis." So reads the headline from New Jersey's Star Ledger.

It's the biggest news that isn't. Really, I am surprised that "Corruption in N.J." isn't a tag on Fark Florida gets one, why not the Garden State? I'll admit, I meant that as a joke until I read the story on NJ.com, the Star Ledger's Web site. At the bottom of the story was a a Corruption in NJ tag. Let me repeat that. NJ.com has a state-corruption section on its site. Seriously.

Wall Street Journal writers Amir Efrati, Suzanne Sataline and Dionne Searcey latched onto Jersey stereotypes for the Journal's front-page coverage, which was somewhat deserved (this being corruption in New Jersey) and sometimes not.

Examples of taking the Jersey stereotype too far include the two references to "The Sopranos" in the first five paragraphs and these gems:

Court documents read like a pulp crime novel. At one point, Mr. Dwek (described as a "cooperating witness" in criminal complaints) is quoted saying to an alleged money-launderer: "I have at least $100,000 a month coming from money I 'schnookied' from banks for bad loans."
Another time, Mr. Dwek gave one of the alleged co-conspirators a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000 cash, the documents say.

-and-

"Business is very good. Prada, Gucci, boom, boom, boom," Mr. Dwek boasted at one point, according to court papers.

Then there is the use of dialect in a sidebar that you only got reading the print version. Next to a picture of Acting U.S. Attorney General Ralph J. Marra Jr. doing his best at mobster-style hand motioning is the following:

Solomon Dwek: 'I wanna do, eh, I need a zone change, I need something, I wanna make sure that I, you know, you, you're my man.'

Peter Cammarano: 'I promise you...you're gonna be, you're gonna be treated like a friend.'

All of a sudden I want some pizza. Or maybe some diner grub.

However, I did enjoy the reference to kidney trafficking as being "a lucrative, illegal industry and not one that's typically showcased alongside political shenanigans."

I don't know. Though by definition shenanigans could mean any surreptitious or mischievous behavior, I generally put it more on par with making out in the backseat of a car or lighting fireworks in a parking lot, not money laundering and cash bribes. However, when you're giving someone $97,000 in a cereal box, the whole thing might actually qualify as shenanigans.

I like that word so much I might re-name this blog.

The kicker quote just about summed it all up for me:

Some residents there said they weren't so surprised. "It happens everywhere in New Jersey," said James Goggin, a Hoboken resident. "I'll tell you one thing -- it never gets boring here. But sometimes I wish it would."

But then how could anyone possibly make this story interesting without relying on stereotypes?

Blogging the U23 World Rowing Championships Day 2

2009-07-24T08:35:00.007-04:00

First day of racing on the official U23 LM4x blog here.

After a hot day of racing, a storm rolled through Racice last night, with winds at a blistering 30 m/s (67 miles per hour). Luckily, racing had been advanced two hours, so there were not any problems with rowers. The boats are a different story.

According to World Rowing:

The terrible news is that a rack of men’s coxed four boats was picked up by the wind, embroiled like a tumble weed until it was stopped by a nearby truck. The coxed fours were from Great Britain, Germany, Ukraine, Italy, New Zealand, France, and USA. A Croatian boat was also involved, but it might be able to be repaired, according to Rainer Empacher of the German Empacher boatbuilders. Italian boatbuilder, Filippi has already organised special transport to be made tomorrow for two coxed fours from Italy. The German team has kindly offered their spare coxed four for use. The Czech Rowing Federation and the German Rowing Federation will be looking for other coxed fours for the remaining teams.

On top of this, the fours rack rolled over the Polish women’s eight and the boat was deemed not repairable at the regatta. The Polish will bring another eight from Poland on Friday. The German women’s eight was also damaged but can be repaired in time for their next race. A few other boats were damaged and more will be known about the damage on Friday.

The wonderful thing about rowing is that boat builders do come to regattas and do care about the teams that use their boats. Also, teams will offer boats and oars to teams whose equipment has been damaged (or who don't want to ship the shells and blades overseas).

- - -

One of the quirks of the World Rowing system is that everyone gets to race in a final to receive a ranking. Therefore there are six "final" races for the lightweight men's single sculls, and four for four other events.

Today the women's four and women's single sculls both finished second in their repechage races. The four will compete in the finals Sunday, while Helen Tompkins in the single will duke it out in the A-level semifinals tomorrow.

The lightweight women’s double sculls, lightweight men’s four, men’s four and lightweight men’s quadruple sculls did not race today, having advanced yesterday straight to Saturday's semifinals. The women's pair, men's four with coxswain, lightweight women's quadruple sculls and women's eight advanced directly to Sunday's final.

The above ten crews (W1x, W2-, LW2x, W4-, LM4-, M4-, M4+, LW4x and LM4x, W8+) are all in medal position.

In other USA news:
The M1x had a tight finish as Argentina's Brian Rosso beat Belgium's Bram Dubois to the finish line by .7 seconds, posting a 7:04.07. Over six seconds behind heading into the final 500 meters, USA's Stephen Lambers made a huge sprint, coming to within one second of Dubois and posting a 7:05.71, just short of making the A/B-level seminfinals.

The M2- missed qualifying for the A-level final in its repechage, losing by 20 seconds to second-place France. It was an incredible battle for first, though, as Germany beat France by .08 seconds, with a time of 6:39.87.

The LW1x is heading to the C-level final.

The LM1x is heading to the C/D-level semifinal.

The M2- is heading to the C-level finals after losing to Georgia by a second and a half.

The W2x is heading to the B-level finals after finishing sixth in their repechage.

The LM2x is heading to the C/D-level semifinals.

The M2x is heading to the C-level finals.

The W4x is heading to the B-level finals.

The M4x is heading to the C/D-level semifinals.

The M8+ is heading to the B-level finals.

Rowing resumes tomorrow, bright and early.

Day 2 results here [.pdf].
Previous results, entries, start lists here.
World Rowing coverage here.
USRowing coverage here.
U.S. boats underweight? here.

Blogging the U23 World Rowing Championships

2009-07-23T13:42:00.003-04:00

Today marked the first day of rowing at the World Rowing Under 23 Championships in Racice, Czech Republic.

The USA lightweight men's quadruple sculls placed third in their heat to advance to the semifinals. Falling behind Germany's 6:08.83 and Hungary's 6:14.40, USA posted a 6:17.15, nearly 30 seconds ahead of Venezuela. Because USA was not pushed for placement, it's unknown what they are capable of facing tougher competition.

The fastest time of the morning was a 6:04.41, posted by Italy.

Repechages* and quarterfinals will be raced Friday, semifinals Saturday and Finals Sunday. Our boys (men?) get a day of rest.

If you're interested in checking out other races, the start list can be found in .pdf format here. Or you could get up early in the morning to check out the live race viewer.

Full Results:
The defending U.S. women's eight won their heat, along with the women's pair and lightweight men's four.

Teams advancing:
LM1x [Quarters]
W2- [Finals]
LW2x [Semis]
M4- [Semis]
LW4x [Finals]
LM4x [Semis]
LM4- [Semis]
M4+ [Finals]
W8+ [Finals]

Teams racing in repechages* tomorrow:
LW1x
W1x
M1x
LM2-
M2-
LM2x
W2x
M2x
W4-
W4x
M4x
M8+

*Repechage: French for "re-fishing," this is a consolation race for lower-placing teams that allows the winner(s) to get back into the medal bracket.

Complete results here [.pdf].
World Rowing coverage here.
USRowing coverage here.

Something in the Water

2009-07-22T11:26:00.004-04:00

One of the Ithaca Times editors today walked into my "office" (an open space next to the managing editor's/A&E editor's office) and asked me whether I'd written the cover story for the issue that hit newsstands today. I told him I hadn't, and he said, good, because Cornell could make you disappear for that sort of thing.

"Calling yourself Mark Twain, or even better, Hemingway, is a good idea for an article like this," he said. "And leave no forwarding address."

The story is good at explaining the scientific aspects, but if I had written it, there are a few things I would have changed:Cay

Include more than two sources, especially for a front-page story.
Talked to someone from Cornell, because the article in a large way concerns the school.
Pit the two sources against each other. Let each know what the other is saying so they can respond.
Do not have Hang defending himself in the third paragraph. Save that for later. Because Hang apologizes before attacking Cornell, he appears as a very weak character.

The article is hardly an attack on Cornell if the "Pollution Patrol" is comprised of one person and his opposition (which is not even Cornell!) gets the last word. I don't think Mr. Chaisson really need fear for his life.

Keeping Busy

2009-07-21T15:33:00.001-04:00

Work done for the GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance:

Preview Article - Old Becomes New
Preview Article - May We Have This Dance?
Blog Post - Learning to Dance

Experiment in Different Media

2009-07-20T14:43:00.010-04:00

My mom instilled in me a love of comics from an early age. Now that I don't get a paper with comics, anymore, I have turned to the web to get my fix.

I love webcomics. My current list of daily visits includes XKCD, Pictures for Sad Children, Doonesbury, Questionable Content, Penny Arcade, Garfield Minus Garfield, Bunny, Exploding Dog and Dog Hates Me.

Some are serious, some are political, some are silly, some are funny. I could be doing something more worthwhile like reading the news, but the comics gives me a good start to my day of avoiding Michael Jackson coverage.

Today I had the idea of drawing comics for this blog. Nothing fancy - and it'll probably be considered a cheap imitation of XKCD, but I think I've actually been doing stick figure cartoons for longer than XKCD has been around. My "Storming of the Met" series was created in December, 2004:

In eighth grade I remember doing a series of political cartoons that I can't find at the moment, and I've been drawing ever since. Maybe this will just be a failed experiment, but it will be an experiment nonetheless. Of course, now that I've actually committed myself to this project, I'm not sure whether my creativity will continue to flow.

"It was, of course, a joint effort."

There's coverage of Walter Cronkite's death...

2009-07-19T20:06:00.002-04:00

...And then there's Glenn Greenwald's coverage of Walter Cronkite's death:

All of that was ignored when he died, with establishment media figures exploiting his death to suggest that his greatness reflected well on what they do, as though what he did was the same thing as what they do (much the same way that Martin Luther King's vehement criticisms of the United States generally and its imperialism and aggression specifically have been entirely whitewashed from his hagiography).
...
Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do -- directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.

Greenwald has this way of making me feel like I have to go to confession - forgive me father, for I have not fought for Truth recently. But he does make a good point. Some journalists are exploiting his death, in a way, by saying they are like him. Others, though, merely describe his greatness. The problem is that Cronkite embodies what every journalist should be (which includes me, of course, so I'm not a true journalist).

Also to consider: this essay.

[Consensus reality] can be a glorious expression of democracy, or it can lead, as it did Saturday morning, to the most e-mailed story on Yahoo! News being the one about the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile crashing into a house in Wisconsin. Democracy has a way of being quite democratic.

It seems that neither method really is entirely effective.

Cronkite's version of the news covered specific items with accuracy, insight and fearlessness, but lacked range (as opposed to today) because of the medium he was working in.

Today's version of the news covers nearly everything, but is too often from a partisan point of view or is misleading or incorrect. Because of the democratization of media, more people (people not even on network television!) like Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman can get to the bottom of things. The problem is picking their truth from a field of lies.

So which do you prefer?

Sex, Lies, Videotape/Sex, Truth, HD-DVD

2009-07-19T20:05:00.003-04:00

Interesting find on Graph Jam:

see more Funny Graphs

Entitled "What I Learned in Journalism School," the venn diagram shows the overlap of Truth and Fiction as Marketing.

Ah, but what is "truth," you ask.

You didn't? Oh. Well... Uh, let's move on then.

I found this exchange in the comments pretty interesting:

Everyone’s a journalist now with their blogs and social networking.
Re: darn those teenagers and their social networking…
Re: Re: Yeah, it cheapens real journalism.
Re: Re: Re: That’s a bit like saying “Girls Gone Wild” cheapens the local prostitutes…

There are plenty of bloggers that create better works of journalism than the MSM. More on that in the next post.

And while the last comment infers that you will always visit your favorite trusted sources even though there are a bunch of people creating amateur content, there are still plenty of independent places out there producing high-quality content.

I'll let that image sink in for a while. Just try not to think of your favorite blogger, you know, producing high-quality content [both are SFW] (ok, technically the second is high-definition, but I think the idea is pretty funny).

Midas Update

2009-07-18T16:39:00.002-04:00

I received an e-mail at 4:08 p.m. July 14 regarding the e-mail I sent off to the Midas corporation - pretty prompt, considering I sent the e-mail around 3:00. Even more impressive was the call I received at 5:21 from (315) 458-6968, based in Syracuse, the regional headquarters for Midas. I informed the man on the line I was busy and asked if he could call back later. "Sure," he said, but he never did.

In any case, I am not unsatisfied that they claim to be looking into the matter, even if I am not offering any other assistance. Here is the text of the e-mail message I received:

Case #:92384

Dear Mr. _____,

Thank you for taking the time out to contact our office regarding your experience with the Midas program. We are truly sorry for having disappointed you.

Midas appreciates being informed of your situation. We have also referred this matter directly to the franchisee for further explanation and handling. You may expect to hear directly from their office within the next three business days. As a business person with ties to the community, they have a strong interest in resolving any difficulties their customers encounter. Your feedback will be acted upon to improve our service.

If you have any additional questions or comments, you may reach us directly at 1-800-621-8380, Monday-Friday 7:30am-5:00pm CST.

Sincerely,

Midas International Corporation

Fool Me Once...

2009-07-14T15:33:00.002-04:00

Below is an e-mail I sent to Midas headquarters today. I had to do good on my promise.

To whom it may concern,

I came into the Ithaca Midas today (7/14) and told the man behind the desk my car needed an oil change and that my service engine light was on. I sat and waited, never having signed a contract, until a man name Dave emerged to tell me what was wrong with my car.

Dave said in addition to the oil change I needed to replace my front sway bar ($437.77), new oxygen sensors ($571.98), a smoke leak detection service ($39.99), and a fuel system cleaning ($69.99). I told him I’d like to consider it and called my mechanic at home (in New Jersey – I am a student at Ithaca College). The mechanic said he could replace the sway bar for $250, well below Dave’s price. He would like to look personally at the other things.

I came back in, but Dave was running an errand. When he returned, I told him I did not want any service done on my car – that a mechanic back home would do it for cheaper. He made a snide comment that I “didn’t have to wait,” and I told him I though he should know I can get it done for cheaper elsewhere. Dave told the mechanics in the shop to “ship it” and as I stepped in my car I was informed that I still needed to pay for the oil change. Having not signed for the oil change, I was surprised, but I figured my car needed it anyway.

Upon re-entering the store, I was informed I would have to pay $97.18 for the “service” done to my vehicle. Dave said the oil change came to $27.99 and that diagnostics (on the bill as “Diagnose Engine with Scan Tool”) came to $69.99. I told Dave I would not be paying, as I had not signed a work authorization contract and was never informed of the expense of the work done on my car. After a bit of discussion, Dave agreed to only have me pay for the oil change (which I also did not sign for). I almost did not pay, but Dave threatened to report me to the police, so I paid $22 in cash, using a $6 discount coupon, and told Dave to keep the change. On the way out Dave made snide remarks toward me and my mechanic at home, informed me of the “40 satisfied customers” he currently had, and otherwise acted in a very unprofessional manner.

I have poured nearly $1,000 into the Ithaca Midas, and feel I have been used. Perhaps I am being used because I am an out-of-state college student. Perhaps their shop overcharges on everything. In any case, I got my tires replaced for nearly half of the Ithaca Midas’s estimated price at another shop. I feel that Ithaca Midas, and Dave in particular, has taken advantage of me. I have no idea how much money I have wasted using that location’s services, but any amount is too much.

Dave must be reprimanded for his actions – his rudeness, his shady dealing, his blatant disregard for obligatory contracts and work authorizations. While I understand that compensation might not be possible for me, I want to ensure that others are not taken advantage of in the same manner. You have lost a customer for life, and this is a story that I will share with my friends and family so that they too will be protected. I will try my hardest to ensure they and I will never enter and therefore never be taken advantage of at any Midas shop ever again.

Sincerely,

_____

[/flame]

Haha, I was originally planning on posting a discussion on this yesterday, but the real-life situation just makes for a much better story and will raise, I think, better responses.

The Economoy as Kryptonite?

2009-07-13T13:17:00.003-04:00

Interesting commentary in last Friday's Wall Street Journal. Jonathon V. Last's "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's...Obama" details the president's depiction in comic books without making any snide comments about Obama's celebrity (which I rather expected, reading the "Taste" section of the WSJ). Mr. Last instead takes aims at the corporations that have cashed in on Obama's image.

There is definitely a college course somewhere in here. As I envision it, it would be a combination of English, history, politics, business and marketing. It would really be a "liberal arts" course (Oh man, I am almost as clever as Philadelphia Inquirer writer Peter Mucha!).

Oh, and my favorite part of the article has to be the last graf, something that I would not expect in the MSM but which could be printed because the Journal sees itself as tough on Obama:

The alternative is that the comic-book [sic] establishment finally feels liberated to let loose its political fantasies. Let's hope it's just commercialism. The last thing we need is comic books descending to the level of respectable mainstream journalism.

Is Google cashing in on Geico's success?

2009-07-13T13:08:00.002-04:00

I'm sure most people have seen Geico's creepy/awesome "Money You Can Be Saving" Character:

But has anyone seen this guy?

It's apparently the new mascot for AdWords. Weird. While I am sure no one holds a patent on googly-eyed characters, it seems like such a blatant rip-off.

Send Rowers Places

2009-07-10T15:11:00.004-04:00

Reposted from the Facebook group, Send the Men's U23 Lightweight Quad to Worlds!:

The four of us just qualified to go to the Under 23 World Championships. This is an extremely costly endeavor for all of us and we need everyones help to do it. Worlds is in Prague, Czech Republic which makes it that much more expensive.

We are in the Lightweight 4x...
4 - Bob Duff
3 - Mike Nucci
2 - Pete Orlando
1 - Will Kelly

Unfortunately, the US doesn't pay for us, so we need everyone's help even if it's a couple bucks.

We are flying out to Prague on July 18th to kick some European ass.

You can help us by going to this website...

http://www.firstgiving.com/guenterbeutter1

THANKS

Read Pete's story here. Feel free to join me in making some dreams come true.

Epiphany Projects

2009-07-10T14:13:00.003-04:00

Recently I had a piece published in the Ithaca Times on Epiphany Project, who played Cornell's Schwartz Center June 30. I asked my editor about publishing the entire interview, but she has not gotten around to it, so it's printed below the rest of this post (I'll tell you when).

Ephiphany Project's most recent album, Hin Dagh, was recorded in Armenia while Bet Williams and John Hodian, who form the band, travelled there. It is a collection of ancient texts sung by Williams and accompanied by Hodian on piano as well as a number of Armenian musicians. The music is haunting, uplifting, and spiritual in ways that have nothing and everything to do with religion.

The show featured but three musicians: Williams, Hodian and drummer Mal Stein. Hearing live renditions of album cuts is exciting, even more so when the arrangement is mixed up. Live, Epiphany Project was able to maintain the intensity of the album with an entirely different arrangement. They played with such a full sound that at times I was amazed that but three performers were on stage.

It's like when you hear an acoustic version of your favorite rock cut and you think, "Wow. This is even better than the original."

But to describe their music would be to do it a disservice. I will let you go and discover that yourself. I will tell you one thing though: Williams teased the audience with a brief bit of Tuvan throat singing at the end of Tubwahun and one other song that escapes me at the moment and...wow. What a talented vocalist.

Working with these musicians really gives me a sense of the unclassifiability of a lot of independent (not "indie rock," but independent of a mainstream record label) bands. I think I'll start calling them hyphen- bands, because it's always something like bluegrass-jazz-zydeco-rock-oldtimecountry or world-jazz-rock-classical. Especially writing articles for the upcoming GrassRoots Festival. The more you define about a band, the less you describe what they actually sound like. It's like anti-journalism: to understand it, you must be descriptive; by describing it with these broad terms like "rock" or "bluegrass" you actually move away from what you are seeking to describe. Very Tao.

So much so, that I am reminded of The Tao of Physics, one of my favorite reads ever. It seeks to bridge quantum physics and Eastern religion, and even if you know little about either, the book will help you to understand both, as well as the relationship between the two.

Sure enough, that book was criticized by physicists who said that author Fritjof Capra didn't really understand the work that goes into physics. It simplified things a bit, which all literature does simply by the inadequacies of language. The Tao Te Ching describes it this way:

The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be defined is not the unchanging name.

And with that ancient text out of the way, I give you the full interview with Epiphany Project:

[As reached via cell phone at their Woodstock recording studio]

Chris:
How do you pronounce the name of Hin Dagh, your most recent album?

John:
Heen-Dah.

Chris:
And what does that mean?

John:
It means “ancient ode” or ancient text.”

Chris:
Which makes sense, given the composition of the CD. What language is that?

John:
Armenian. We recorded that album in Armenia

Chris:
You have a personal connection to Armenia. What is it that drew you there?

John:
Well, I’m Armenian. I’d never been there before. My parents were born here as well, but my grandmother lived there, a survivor of the Armenia Genocide.

Somebody who does a lot of work over there, who has an organization called the Naregatsi Art Institute, a wonderful, philanthropic arts organization, he had heard of my work somehow. [He] arranged to get together with me and basically talked me into going over there, which I never thought I’d do necessarily, especially at the time, because Bet and I had just had a son who was about nine months old.

We went over there and we completely fell in love with the country, with the people, with the work this guy was doing at the Naregatsi Art Institute. And I started working a lot with composers over there. It’s a fascinating country. I think I’d be fascinated by it even if I wasn’t Armenian. It’s got so many things going against it and so many things going for it. It’s the only Christian country in the middle of all these Muslim countries. It’s got a lot of problems with its neighbors, both with Turkey and Azerbaijan. Its only friendly neighbor is Iran.

All the people – not all of them – but a lot of artists, a lot of poets, a lot of composers, a lot of painters – all the streets are named after composers and painters and architects – it’s just a fascinating place, it really is. Especially if you have any interest in history. We’re so used to kind of an American version of history or even a European one, and it’s “oh, wow, this goes back to 1700-something.” A lot of people over there are really more in touch with truly ancient history.

Chris:
I didn’t know there was so much history around there.

John:
Well it’s truly the cradle of civilization.

Chris:
So you were finding these ancient texts there. How did you choose which ones to include in your work?

John:
Oh, it just had to be something that was inspiring. you might want to talk to Bet about that one. She tends to be more on the text part of things. I tend to be more on the music part of things. But as we discovered texts and decided we wanted to sing them, that kind of set us off purposely looking for more texts and meeting scholars or in some cases people who were practicing these texts.

Chris:
What were your influences, then, going into the project?

John:
My influences are pretty wide. I grew up in a house where all they listened to was Armenian music. But I also grew up outside of Philadelphia, so as a kid growing up there was no getting around popular music, which is everything from conventional popular music: the Beatles, Motown, that sort of stuff. But then most of my training was in classical music. I spent a lot of years studying classical composition and piano and what not. Bet, on the other hand, has almost the exact opposite situation. All the things that we missing in me, she sort of has. She’s more of a singer-songwriter, which I never was. She was very involved in musical theater. Her father directed musicals, she’s been in a lot of musicals. And she had classical voice training, making her more of a singer-songwriter. At first glance we wouldn’t have that much to do with each other, at least on paper. But as a composer, I was really interested in finding a voice to write for. As a singer-songwriter, Bet was doing more conventional songs, but she was also experimenting: doing things with backwards vocals and strange tunings. And it’s in that kind of in-between netherworld – between classical music and world music and experimental stuff, and folk music – that we met, and that gave birth to Epiphany Project. So our influences are all that stuff, but we never sit down and consciously try to doing things, even with this. We didn’t say “Hey, let’s write a world music record that deals with ancient texts.” It just is what it is. We just did it because we happened to be in Armenia at that time, traveling around a lot in the rural parts of the country. And it was time for a new Epiphany Record. And that’s what came out. By recording over there we were able to work with a lot of phenomenal Armenian musicians. It presented a lot of challenges, but also a lot of great opportunities.

Chris:
How does recording in Armenia compare to recording in Armenia?

John:
Well, it’s hard. Armenia’s a very poor country. It’s almost – you cannot find a good piano to record on. There’s one decent piano in the opera house, and if you lobby them for months and months they might let you record on it, but then you still have to slip the guard $100 at the last minute. I say all this because it’s something that we did at one point. So just in terms of resources like that, it’s really, really hard. In terms of resources like musicians and talent, it’s fantastic. We used a lot of instruments like kamancha and duduk and things we wouldn’t have access to here. I mean you can find people who play those instruments, but maybe not as genuinely, as wonderfully as people over there.

Chris:
You do a lot of touring in Europe, in Germany in particular. What draws you there?

John:
They want us there? [chuckles] We tend to go where we’re wanted, where we have more of a following. For us, we happen to have more of a following there. Plus our agent is in Germany and most of our support is there.

Chris:
What brings you to Cornell?

John:
I’m not really sure how they heard us or heard of us. But we’re really looking forward to playing there. I haven’t been in the hall, but I’ve looked at it and I’ve heard it’s really wonderful, and the piano plays wonderful, which is something I’m looking forward to. A lot of times you don’t know what you’re gonna get from an instrument. I’m really looking forward to coming up there and playing this show. We’re playing with, Bet and I, with a phenomenal drummer from the Lower East Side who plays a lot of hand percussion. He’s great whether it’s a jazz thing or a world thing or a Middle Eastern thing. He’s great at odd time signatures. When it’s just the three of us, like this concert will be, it leaves things very wide open and becomes a kind of energetic, improvisatory…I find the trio concerts are especially exciting.

Chris:
How do you keep your improvisation fresh in show after show?

John:
The songs are the songs, and they are what they are. But between them there’s a lot of room to do anything. In fact, we almost approach it like jazz music, in that there is what’s called a “head, ” but then how you treat that, and what you do underneath that, and where you go from there is fairly wide open. I wouldn’t be very interested in playing the same thing night after night. I don’t think I’d be able to play the same thing night after night. So my main interest is in trying to start from scratch every night and trying to invent it as much on the spot as possible. And the interaction between the drummer and I, and the way Bet feeds off of that, is I think what makes the live shows so exciting.

Chris:
How about the crowd energy?

John:
That’s really important. That’s almost everything. You can’t do it without that.

Chris:
This might sound silly, but do that American crowds differ from the European crowds in any way?

John:
Sort of. Sometimes the American crowds can seem more boisterous and energetic and enthusiastic. In parts of some countries the crowd is very quiet and sedate. I think, “Gosh, maybe they’re just not getting this or they’re just not liking it. And then you find out at the end, they’ve kind of saved their applause. Then they’re extremely enthusiastic and they’ve been really profoundly moved. They just show it in a different way, which makes sense. American’s just kind of a louder, slightly more boisterous country. The audiences do tend to differ. I also find there’s less age-ism over there. A venue will have young people, old people, middle-aged people, all sorts of people in it. Whereas in America, this place is a rock club, that place is a classical music venue. Those kind of distinctions are not as prevalent over there. Which is helpful to us because it’s kind of hard to figure out what we are, whether it’s a world music thing or folk-rock thing or jazz, and it really comes out in between all that stuff.

Chris:
Is there anything else you would like to add?

John:
Sometimes people, based on whatever they happen to have read, might think, “Oh, it’s very serious thing they’re doing. They’re doing ancient sacred music; we’ll have to be quiet.” like they’re going to church or something. It’s not like that at all. It’s a really energetic, earthy, rhythmic and intense event. Especially seeing Bet, Bet’s a very dynamic, charismatic performer.

[Cell phone changes hands]

Chris:
I read in your e-mail that you’re in the studio right now. Where is that?

Bet:
We’re in Woodstock. We have a studio in an old farmhouse up in Woodstock where we work. We were in the city for many years, but we’re holing up in Woodstock for a while before we go back to Europe – actually to Armenia.

Chris:
Oh, cool, are you touring out there?

Bet:
We’re going to be doing some film stuff. And back to Europe for a tour in August and September.

Chris:
Might I ask what the film’s about?

Bet:
Sure. We’re doing a couple different things. John’s working on some footage form Armenia to do music-driven images of Armenia through the years – found footage, that sort of thing. An artsy project. Then I think we’re going to shoot some video to some of our songs, but we’re not really VH1-ing. But we’re gonna do film to music, that sort of thing.

Chris:
There’s always YouTube or your Web site.

Bet:
Exactly. Which has made this whole new world for people, with YouTube. It’s fascinating.

Chris:
I found some of your work on Youtube, actually. Really cool stuff.

Bet:
Thanks, that’s cool. You know, I kind of overheard what John was saying. It’s tough to say what [the music] is. And I also heard him say that it is successful. It is, and we do a lot of songs in English, too, but this past album happened to be more – actually, there are some English songs on it – but more of it is from the ancient texts or from some poetry.

Chris:
What prompted you to sing the ancient texts on this album?

Bet:
Being in that part of the world, it’s really fascinating. You really feel like, wow, the petroglyphs have been here for thousands of years. I’ve always been fascinated by dead and dying languages. To be able to speak or to try to speak words that people have spoken for thousands of years, to me that’s fascinating. And what people were saying through time, human beings. I’m not a religious person, but I am fascinated by the human experience and human spirituality, what people have been thinking since the dawn of time when they look at the stars, what they think what is the way to be in the world as a human being.

I guess I got drawn into the Aramaic writings because on our first album we had had a song called Tubwahun, which is the beatitudes. A friend of ours from Syria actually gave us a version of Avvon d’Bishmaiya, which is the Lord’s Prayer in the way it is spoken. And translated directly it’s more interesting to me than how it’s come through the King James version or whatever. Then people got wind of the fact that I was looking for ancient texts – I wasn’t trying to do anything specific, but I was just gathering writings form different religions, from different poets and finding, “what’s the link here?” The things I was drawn to seemed to have something in common. John and I started improvising with some of these words and that’s what became the album, some of the improvisations and some of the poetry. One of the songs is from the Zoroastrians, and it’s from one of their ancient prayers, and it basically is about making yourself better for the refreshment of the universe. And I love that. I love that piece of that. I don’t have to agree with anything that any religion says, but if there’s a piece there that’s so beautiful… Or there’s another song, Nainam, on the record, in Sanskrit. It’s basically: weapons cannot destroy the soul, fire cannot destroy the soul, air, water; nothing can destroy the imperishable soul. For this album I took some of the texts and the ancient poetry and I really just put together what was moving for me. Then John and I would go over it and see, “well, how does this work with this music?” And we improvised with some really great musicians in Armenia too, some of the masters. That was a fantastic experience, playing with some of the greatest musicians in Armenia.

Chris:
It seems like the way you describe the way you put together the album, it’s like a piece of this, a piece of that, improvisation. That, for me at least, seems to define your style.

Bet:
[laughs] Yeah, you’re probably right. It does draw from a lot. I guess that’s just how I am with what I’m interested in, even musically: just this and that.

It’s also fun to sing in languages not your own. I think when you speak a different language, whether it’s ancient or French or German or whatever, it moves your mind in a different way. For me, I like that. It’s like poetry; poetry moves your mind in a different way when you speak it. With the concerts I feel a lot of times when I’m connecting to an audience, you can see people moving with you and they add to it too. I love doing this music because, like John was saying, it can reach across – it doesn’t have to be just one thing. I think a lot of people can relate to that, I hope.

Chris:
Have you noticed your music is received differently in different places, like say, America versus Germany?

Bet:
Sure. We’ve been mostly touring in Europe and I think we’ve been touring mostly in Europe because we’re very well accepted there. It is kind of an artsier thing. It’s not pop music, but it’s not inaccessible. Do I think Americans only want pop music? No! But I think as far as audiences, maybe people are willing to try something new and different in Europe. And if they like it, great. Maybe in America people like to categorize things more.

Chris:
It’s not pop, but it still has energy.

Bet:
I think so too. For me, it’s certainly not sedate, and especially with __ Singh, our percussionist, he’s just great. He brings so much to it and he moves right with us, so it’s an evolving thing on stage that can happen, especially with an audience that’s willing. I’m looking forward to coming to Ithaca. I used to come there in college because my college roommate lived there. So I’d go to the Haunt, or whatever. I remember in Ithaca people were definitely into music. So I’m really looking forward to connecting with the people in Ithaca. We have some friends up there who are very into music and it seems like a very musical town.

Chris:
You’re in the studio right now, does that mean you’re recording another album?

Bet:
We are. We’re recording, actually resurrecting, some stuff we worked on years and years ago. There were some old songs and we stumbled across some old pages and said, “Oh, what’s this?” So we’re seeing what’s there and we’re working on some new pieces. We just had the piano tuned and I’m just getting ready to sing some vocals. It’s good, it’s a moist day so that’s good for the voice.

Chris:
Any chance we’ll hear some of that at the upcoming Cornell show?

Bet:
I think we will bring out a couple new pieces, for sure. Yeah…

The Power of One

2009-07-09T12:41:00.003-04:00

Congratulations Pete-O!

Powerhouse Timing results for the 2009 USRowing U23 & Jr World Championship Trials seem to indicate that former IC rower Pete Orlando is heading to the 2009 Under-23 World Rowing Championships!

Indeed, he just lit up my phone via text:

Going to u23 world championships!

Pete will be facing some of the best young competition on the planet in Racice, Czech Republic in the lightweight quad (4x).

A former commodore for Ithaca College, Pete only became a lightweight within the past year and a half after a lot of hard work and possible starvation. Clearly it was worth it.

Best of luck in this race and all the regattas to come.

“This should scare the hell out of you.”

2009-07-05T22:08:00.000-04:00

I have been following Katie O’s blog for a while and enjoy the irreverence, humor and insight of a fellow journalism major who is now out in the real world doing things that people do in the real world.

For journalists, this means blogging.

Her most recent entry details the New York Times’ cover-up of David Rohde’s kidnapping. It raises many interesting questions about the powers and responsibilities of the New York Times.

For example, “How many stories have been/are being hidden from public view?”

Besides lazy journalism and corporate influence, how much more are we missing from coverage? And how do you balance freedom of speech with the right to life?

Here is an excerpt, but I strongly recommend checking out the entire post:
The whole episode does bring into question the ability of the Times to perform such an operation. A swift, tactical, complete media blackout is a very scary notion. Even the blogosphere was silenced. Granted, in this case it was for a good cause, and probably met with little resistance. But for bigger, juicier, more consequential stories, should we have any doubt that they couldn’t enact the same purposeful total eclipse of information for less benign reasons? Did the Times inadvertently grant a peak behind the curtain and reveal a glimpse of the type of control (cooperation?) they can exact from the Fourth Estate?

Keeping it in the family

2009-06-30T22:15:00.003-04:00

I am fascinated by (and terrified of) media empires. And while Walt Disney's is pretty scary, none scares me so much as Rupert Murdoch's.

When you own so much, it can be difficult to find sources outside of your media family. Take this passage from a recent Wall Street Journal article by Stacy Meichtry concerning Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi:

Mr. Berlusconi has charged the foreign media with fanning his troubles. In one episode, he accused News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, of orchestrating personal attacks on him through the media in retaliation for the Italian government's decision in late November to raise the value-added tax on satellite TV subscriptions, a market dominated in Italy by News Corp.'s Italian pay-TV unit Sky Italia. Rupert Murdoch, CEO and chairman of News Corp., called the allegations "nonsense" in an interview on Fox Business Network earlier this month. A spokesman for News Corp. declined to comment on the matter.

Rupert Murdoch commenting on his business to a company he owns? Is anyone even trying? Does that really add anything to the article? Here, let me show you how silly this is.

U.S. President Barack Obama is questioned for the details of the bailout. His daughter Malia interviews him on this:

Malia Obama: Daddy, are you doing everything right with the bailout?
Barack Obama: Yes.

Malia gives the news to Sasha Obama, who works it into her essay on U.S. economic policy. (it's amazing what they make third graders do these days!) An excerpt below:

When Malia asked my dad if he was doing the right thing with the bailout, he said he was. I think he would know, because he is the Leader of the Free World, after all. Bo didn't have anything to say, but he did scratch his ear and whine for a treat.

(Awww, it's so cute when children capitalize abstract concepts like Love and Leader of the Free World!)

But at least Sasha's report isn't printed on the front page of one of America's newspapers of record. That would just be silly.

I bounce like kanga, get high like planes

2009-06-26T14:40:00.005-04:00

"Stoned wallabies create opium crop circles"

No pictures, but probably the best mental image you will get all day.

P.S. If they were to try these creatures in a court of law, would it be considered a kangaroo court?

Tweet: "Web site" is proper AP style!

2009-06-26T09:20:00.002-04:00

Despite reading Doonesbury every day, this feature on the Columbia Journalism Review Web site was rather difficult.

And quite amusing.

To blog is to pee one's pants.

2009-06-23T08:48:00.008-04:00

"People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch." -Jack Nicholson

Congratulations, Randolph High School class of 2009!

You made it through those awkward years of high school and are now ready to take on the world. But before you do, here is a refresher course in metaphors in case you ever have to, say, give another graduation speech as president of the Student Government Association.

In "The Dead," James Joyce employs an extended metaphor full of battle imagery to drive home the tension of the dinner party and the militaristic outlook of the time. This is 1914, after all, and Ireland seems poised on the brink of civil war:

A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.

After that, the metaphor dissolves, having served its purpose. It doesn't wander, it isn't mixed, and everything matches up. At one paragraph in length, it achieves everything Joyce aimed for.

How to use a metaphor:

Make it brief. Metaphors should last for a paragraph at most, because if they go any longer you will inevitably lose your way in the deep, dark forest of metaphor with no gun to keep you safe from the bears that hide in the crevices of contemplation eating the honey of deception.
Make everything match up. That last one was confusing, right? Corresponding parts go together. Parents are lifeguards. Teachers are beach umbrellas. Don't tell me I'm going to get attacked by a shark without telling me what a shark corresponds with. Otherwise I'll spend the rest of my life wary of land sharks.
Don't mix. You'll use this little nugget pretty frequently in college. Despite the hilarious absurdity of the image, I am not chased by seagulls through the halls of Randolph High. Rather, I am chased by seagulls on the beach. Which means, of course, that I am chased by cops through the halls of RHS.
Make it believable. Don't tell me that Pizza Palace is like an arcade on the metaphorical boardwalk because you idly spend your time and money there. Pizza Palace is the pizza place on the metaphorical boardwalk because you order pizza there. There may very well be a joint that corresponds to the arcade, but a pizza place is not it.

I cooked up this handy reference chart displaying the efficacy of metaphor in writing:

As for the title for this post, well, it is believable; I just haven't told you the corresponding part yet.

You do it alone, but everyone can see the result. And make comments.

Our next lesson will be in speaking to your audience, in case you are ever made salutatorian and also have to make a speech at graduation without embarrassing yourself.

Things aren't so different

2009-06-17T14:42:00.002-04:00

Perhaps I've been reading too much apocalyptic literature.

Bailout
- a prayer -

By the East River, there we sat and wept, when we remembered Wall Street

Great animating Spirit,
maker, breaker of bonds,
that draws the cycling tides
round our knees or out to sea
in black night or red dawn,
that shades green our eyes
as earth grays, is concretized,
hear our prayer.

Through our neglect of custom
we have fallen from Your favor.
On our own account we no longer savor
Your richness. How quickly we
have learned the cost of our actions.

Is our smoke displeasing,
factories replace ox and kid –
is this foul incense?
Our machines slaughter stock
for us now, is this displeasing?
Have we not fallen
toward Wall Street and prayed?
Must we ourselves dash the blood
upon your altar, above our doorframes,
renounce our old ways, forsake
Detroit’s sweet machines?

Accept our new sacrifice,
one point one trillion backed
by your people, allotted by our priests,
loaded on Your people’s backs.

To You, oh Economy, we offer this gift,
as our fathers shed blood
so the sun might rise
as our mothers pinched us,
so we might shed tears
and again the sun
might greet our eyes.

Amen.

White House TV

2009-06-16T15:16:00.003-04:00

- or, "It hurts to agree with the Drudge Report" -

Yikes! ABC will be broadcasting live from the White House with a special on healthcare reform?

That's like broadcasting live from within a private office of an auto exec. Any way you go about it, you're going to be a guest.

However, if you view the White House as an American institution and not Obama's personal property, you can begin to see why this almost makes sense. Drudge, of course, is skewing the issue. Let's see what the fine succinct folks at USA Today have to say:

On the night of June 24, ABC News and Obama will host a health care town hall at the White House. The president will take questions "from an audience made up of Americans selected by ABC News who have divergent opinions in this historic debate," according to the network.

Double yikes! Let's zoom in on that last sentence for a second. Are you focused? Good. Now check out this quote of ABC News Senior Vice President Kerry Smith:

"ABCNEWS [sic] alone will select those who will be in the audience asking questions of the president. Like any programs we broadcast, ABC News will have complete editorial control. To suggest otherwise is quite unfair to both our journalists and our audience."

So the media is more similar to the government than we initially thought. Now instead of the government picking the reporters who will ask "the best" (read: softball) questions, ABC News is hand picking an audience that will surely represent America in every way.

Well I certainly hope to see Joe "A Little Off His Rocker" Nonagerian and Jane "Single Ethnic Minority Mother Living in the Projects Who Might Or Might Not Have A Drug Problem" Doe. Because that's what town hall meetings are truly like. And it will sure as hell make it more interesting than Billy Collins and Bill Cosby sitting around, wondering what they're doing there.

Actually, those last two might not be so bad. But drunken farmers and hostile auto workers would certainly be better. Let's hope they let them in.

What happened here?

2009-06-11T15:55:00.006-04:00

It seems the emphasis of this blog has shifted away from the independent media as a whole, though that will definitely be a major component of future posts. For now, at least, this blog will be about me (but aren't all blogs). Well, not about me specifically, but about things I find interesting and relevant.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Thank you, professor Cohen, wherever you are, for giving me a reason to begin this blog. It's a good exercise in creativity and analysis.

Some promotion:
I'd like to encourage everyone who reads this to check out my good friend Pete's blog. The captain of last year's Ithaca men's rowing team, he is at a USRowing lightweight sculling development camp. He's chronicling his story here.

Some Self-Promotion:
As an editorial intern in the Arts and Entertainment section of the Ithaca Times this summer, it is my job to proof copy, write articles and help put together the "Times Table." My first article was published yesterday, and I think it came out all right.

I also contribute to the Ithaca Times arts blog, Popcorn Youth. You can read my most recent post here, and I'll repost it below as well.

In other news, I am working on an honors thesis next year with Professor Michael Twomey. The topic? Prophets and the Apocalypse. (Not to be confused with "Profits and the Apocalypse," a terrifying tale of why the sinking world economy is a sign of the end times.) If I find anything interesting or relevant, I'll post it here.

What's on your summer reading list?
[Originally posted to the Popcorn Youth blog June 5, 2009]

I think the last teen/young adult book I read was Frindle in eighth grade. By this point I was reading mostly Tom Clancy, and just getting into John Grisham. Ho ho, I thought, I’m so mature. This book is about fifth graders, ho ho.

But then I really liked it. It had all the classic elements of teen lit: school, struggles with teachers and bullies, a smart kid to outwit them all. I sure wasn’t getting everything in Rainbow Six, but this I could understand. I’d been through stuff like this in the past.

Frindle was, if I remember correctly, very light-hearted, with no more conflict than student versus teacher or student versus bully. A little alienation here and there, but nothing big. That’s what I thought I’d find in Slob, local writer Ellen Potter’s latest teen novel. I was completely wrong. This book cuts pretty deep. And does it really well.

I first picked up this book doing research fro an upcoming article on Potter, thinking it would be important to know some of her work and style. I finished the whole thing in about two hours, unable to put it down.

Slob tells the story of Owen Birnbaum, a seventh grader growing up in New York City. He has an IQ of 139 and is 57% (e.g. 57 pounds) heavier than your average 12 year-old. His weight, of course, has him as the butt of many cruel jokes, including those of his teacher. He didn’t always used to be so heavy. In fact, he only started putting on weight about two years ago after an event that isn’t named until three-quarters of the way through the book. He has the stretch marks to prove it.

Owen’s an inventor, and is trying to come up with a contraption to see into the past, in order to see what happened two years ago. What is this mysterious event? Well, you’ll have to read for yourself, but if Dostoyevsky wrote a children’s book, he’d probably treat it in a similar way. The psychological implications of the incident are well-treated and the event itself is incredibly dark and heart-rending.

It’s a nice coming-of-age tale in which villains can be heroes, supposed heroes can be villains and everyone has a secret. Oh, and the guy with the one-point-short-of-genius IQ? He’s not nearly as good at understanding other people as he is at understanding his homework.

So if you’re looking for something to read this summer that’s not too challenging and won’t take up too much time, try a young-teen novel like Slob. It’s okay, Edward Cullen and Robert Langdon will be there when you get back.

A New Opportunity

2009-06-07T12:15:00.003-04:00

May 22, 2009 - USRowing adds yet another collegiate championship regatta into the spring racing mix. Besides the risk of the race dates coinciding, isn't it a little absurd that there are so many "national" championships? That's three "national" championships we have now in the United States.

What is USRowing thinking? IRA is widely considered the national championship for men's racing. A new championship not just under the name of but actively controlled by USRowing pits the prestigious Intercollegiate Rowing Association against what amounts to its parent company. If you want to row internationally, the only way to do it is through USRowing.

Rowing championships are messed up enough as it is. Take a look at the ACRA championship results. In the men's varsity eight, Michigan destroyed the competition, finishing nearly eight seconds ahead of the UC Davis. Last place was Texas, with a 6:31.1. See the strength gap?

It's even more pronounced in the men's varsity four with cox, which Penn State won with a 6:40.2. LSU staggered across the petite-finals line with a 7:31.0. In the third-level final, Binghamton finished with a 7:10.6 (bad seeding?) while Ohio State struggled for a 7:42.5, over a minute behind Penn State.

What I like about the ACRAs, though, is the emphasis on small boats.

Everyone knows the Varsity 8 is the holy grail of collegiate rowing, showing you can field eight strong rowers at your school. But what about schools that only have, say, four great rowers and twelve other mediocre ones? Question: Do you put together a strong four and a mediocre eight or a mediocre eight and a mediocre four?

Answer: You put your strongest guys in the eight, because that is your Texas Football Team(TM). Your Texas Football Team wins you respect, even if all the players are weaker than those soccer pansies (read: scullers and other technically good rowers, etc.) who are only good for giving you kickers. You lead with your Texas Football Team because it's the biggest penis you have to flaunt.

USRowing could really shine in offering elite-level competition in small boats and sculling (1x, 2-, 2x as well as 4- and 4x). This is an unfilled niche in the rowing championship market. Both the NCAA and IRA championships focus on big boats (eights and fours). The USRowing championships would offer a nice championship for smaller schools and those that wish to focus more on sculling.

From the press release:

"The purpose of creating this event is to provide a post-season regatta for the collegiate community that truly reflects an open format across multiple boat classes," said USRowing Chief Executive Officer Glenn Merry. "Our junior programs have really embraced small boat rowing and sculling, and this regatta will provide similar racing opportunities for collegiate rowers."

That "open format" does not exist now, but USRowing stands able to really create it with this championship. Long under-represented, sculling and small-boats offer a great opportunity for smaller schools and teams that do not have the recruiting power of D-I and Ivy schools.

Who are you?

2009-06-06T09:39:00.002-04:00

So I'm on the Drudge Report today and I see the top banner ad is for the antioxidant resveratrol, which it claims is supposed to reduce aging.

Well, I just so happen to be taking part in a resveratrol study right now, to determine its effect on athletic performance. I clicked on the link to learn more, and it took me to this site, news3news.com. I read all about this reporter, Katie Wilson, who researched and tried resveratrol etc. etc. Hmmm, I thought, this looks like an advertisement.

So I clicked on a link. Bingo.

Supposedly "News 3 News" is out of Sacramento, California. There is even real-time weather in a sidebar and news from California at the bottom of the page. But all links take you to the ResvPure homepage. Ah ha! You got me!

It turns out there is a legitimate "News 3" in Sacramento, KCRA. But who is this Katie Wilson? After some research, I don't think that's her real name. This was the closest I found, but she parts her hair a different way.

Of course, you should be suspicious any time you click on an ad and are directed to a seemingly legitimate news or blog. But who knows who else links to this?

Politics as a Religious Experience

2009-05-26T15:42:00.002-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I think it's sensational that Sonia Sotomayor has been nominated for the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama. Apparently so does Matt Drudge, his headline reading, "Obama Picks Latina." So this is a black man nominating an...American...whose parents are Puerto Rican...who is a...no! a woman? That noun ends in an "a" - it's feminine!

Oh will the diversity never end!?

Let's take a look at the current Supreme Court breakdown:

John Roberts: White Male, Roman Catholic
John Paul Stevens: White Male, Protestant
Antonin Scalia: White Male, Roman Catholic (half Italian)
Anthony Kennedy: White Male, Roman Catholic (Not a "real" Kennedy)
David Souter: White Male, Episcopalian
Clarence Thomas: Black Male, Roman Catholic (Succeeded Thurgood Marshall)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: White Female, Jewish
Stephen Breyer: White Male, Jewish
Samuel Alito: White Male, Roman Catholic

Okay, that's:
89% White vs. 75% of the population*
89% Male vs. 49% of the population*

*Based on 2000 Census

So clearly we're under representing women and minorities, right? But just take a look at the religions:

56% Catholic vs. 25% of the population
22% Jewish vs. 1% of the population
11% Protestant vs. 51% of the population (Protestant meaning Christian but not Catholic)
11% Episcopalian vs. 1% of the population

Oy vey! How did all those Jews and Catholics get into the Supreme Court?

While we're diversifying the Court by increasing both the woman and minority categories, we're gaining another Catholic, making 2/3 of the Court Roman Catholic and wiping out Episcopalians entirely.

But even without her nomination, I've noticed a very disturbing trend in the homogeneity the United States Supreme Court (that's homogeneity as in "sameness," not "gayness"). A full 44% of the Supreme Court is controlled by men named John or Anthony. Where are all the other names? So far a Christopher has not been chosen, though John has been the name of 9% of all Supreme Court Justices to have served.

Indeed, the lack of diversity is a shame.

Two scoops, with sprinkles.

2009-05-26T13:10:00.001-04:00

Oops.

Though I walk throught the valley...

2009-05-19T12:59:00.001-04:00

The separation of Church and State.

Dial Denial

2009-05-07T13:00:00.003-04:00

It's time to get a landline, because it might just decrease my rampant binge-drinking.

In and article entitled, "More Americans Drink And Dial On Cell Phones: Is the U.S. turning into a wireless, drunken nation?" Channel Matters reported on a recent CDC study connecting binge drinking and cell phone use:

A new study from the Centers for Disease Control released Wednesday found that more than one in every five Americans are now using only mobile phones, and pulling the plugs on their landlines. The study also found that Americans who choose to use only mobile phones also are more likely to be binge drinkers.

It continues:

Results from the July through December 2008 study also found that for some reason, the prevalence of binge drinking (defined as having five or more alcoholic drinks in one day during the past year) among wireless-only adults (36.7 percent) was nearly twice as high as the prevalence among adults living in households that had landline phones only (19.7 percent).

Five drinks in one day over the past year? It's a good thing they didn't do this poll at a college, where no one has a landline and many drink that much at least once a week. Oh, wait... The CDC might be onto something... But seriously, five drinks in one day in the past 365 days? If we measured obesity by how much food a person ate one one day in the last year, I'd be screwed.

My post-erg marathon (42,195 meters) meal:

Bacon, tomato, and cheese egg-white omelette
Bagel with cream cheese
Belgian waffle with syrup
Bowl of cereal
Homefries
Banana
Glass of chocolate milk
Glass of orange juice
Glass of cranberry juice
2 Glasses of water

I must be so fat. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that I'm a neurotic e-mail checker.

But I misled you a bit:

No further information was released about these findings and the CDC didn't attempt to explain the correlation between binge drinking and cell phone-only usage.

For that matter, so did Channel Matters, which just goes to show that if it bleeds, it leads, even if if the headline (sub-header, in this case) lies to you.

Have a good one, I'm going to go have less than five beers and call my friends on my cell.

Beware of Cheap Coffee?

2009-04-30T20:14:00.004-04:00

So despite loving Gimme Coffee (woo, go local!), I am on a Starbucks mailing list because occasionally they send out coupons for free coffee. And Starbucks coffee ain't cheap.

Funny that this is their new advertising move.

My favorite new reads: "Beware of a cheaper cup of coffee. It comes with a price."
Notice that Starbucks is not saying, "cheap cup" but rather "cheaper cup," as if any cup of coffee below their price is inferior. I find it strange that during a time of increased financial awareness, Starbucks not not only embraces but flaunts its image, performing an about-face on its $1 cup experiment in January 2008.

A close second: "This is what coffee tastes like when you pour your ~~wallet~~ heart into it."

Emerging Trends

2009-04-21T12:55:00.002-04:00

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has released the State of the News Media 2009 report. In it six "new emerging" trends were identified:

The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored.
Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions.
On the Web, news organizations are focusing somewhat less on bringing audiences in and more on pushing content out.
The concept of partnership, motivated in part by desperation, is becoming a major focus of news investment and it may offer prospects for the financial future of news.
Even if cable news does not keep the audience gains of 2008, its rise is accelerating another change—the elevation of the minute-by-minute judgment in political journalism.
In its campaign coverage, the press was more reactive and passive and less of an enterprising investigator of the candidates than it once was.

Two through five make perfect sense to me, and I am not enough of a political junky to argue six, but I do have a problem with one. Exploring new ideas? Sounds great! Let's see what the Pew Project came up with:

1. Adopt the cable model, in which a fee to news producers is built into monthly Internet access fees consumers already pay. News industry executives have not seriously tested this enough to know if it could work, but these fees provide half the revenue in cable.

Surely we'd hear the cries: "The ESPN model? But what if I don't watch ESPN!?" Then take tell me what a "news producer" is. Would theHuffington Post be considered? How about the Drudge Report? There will have to be some serious line drawing in some rapidly shifting sand.
And what about the day when Google provides us all with free Internet? (Please check out that link, even if you don't care about free Internet)

2. Build major online retail malls within news sites. This could both create a local search network for small businesses and link them directly with consumers to complete transactions, not just offer advertising—with the news operation getting a point-of-purchase fee.

So this is...Craigslist meets Amazon? Newspapers are trying to get back that lost revenue that came from connecting people to what they want through classifieds. Not a bad idea, but let's hope no big corporations are let in.

3. Develop subscription-based niche products for elite professional audiences. These are more than subject-specific micro-sites. They are deep, detailed, up-to-the-minute online resources aimed at professional interests, and they are a proven and highly profitable growth area in journalism.

How...elitist? Actually I like this idea because niche journalism definitely has the potential to sell. A plus: it's produced for those who find it useful, so it can be more technical and geared toward that audience.

More on the issue (an AFP piece in the Tehran Times) here.

Jennifer Government

2009-04-20T09:27:00.003-04:00

Combine 1984, American Psycho, and The Matrix and you get Jennifer Government. In author Max Berry's corporate future there is no tax and the United States is simply the collection of companies that operate within its territories. Even the government has been privatized. It's as far as you can get from 1984's Big Brother or the minutemen's fear of a "New World Order." But the typologies of government eschatology (1984, Brave New World, Farenheit 451) still exist - they are simply reversed in a terrifying display of consumerism.

Two customer rewards programs bind American businesses into one of two factions: Team Advantage and US Alliance. That seems a bit silly, but it isn't too far of a leap from today's corporate model in which Disney and GE control large swaths of not only media but also technology.

I wish Barry had given a little more information as to the media. Apparently in the future there are still papers, but because the only functional independent company is the government, I wonder how they would survive. Probably all media would be partisan. Clearly, independent media would be really important, but would probably be inaccessible or at least censored, depending on who controls the wires.

An excerpt:

John Nike was reading a novel called The Space Merchants; it had been reissued and he'd seen a review in Fast Company. They called it "prescient and hilarious," which John was having a hard time agreeing with. All these old science-fiction books were the same: they thought the future would be dominated by some hard-ass, oppressive Government. Maybe that was plausible back in the 1950s, when the world looked as if it might turn Commie. It sure wasn't now.

In The Space Merchants, the world was dominated by two advertising companies, which was closer to the truth. But still, there were so many laws the companies had to follow! If these guys had all the money, John wondered, who could stop them doing whatever they wanted?

That's a chilling question, even today.

Love Song of A Blogger [Prufrock?]

2009-04-15T21:13:00.006-04:00

Instructions: Take T.S. Eliot, the Huffington Post and a blogger. Dice. Stir until evenly distributed. Add salt to taste.

One of the beauties of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is that it works outward in, first dealing with the world before exploring how the poet fits into it. I didn't realize it until I was more than halfway done with this...work. I don't want to call it a parody. I'd rather think of it as a tribute. I will add links as I find more articles that apply.

Let us go then, you and me
As the search terms are spread out against the screen,
Endless winking code at our disposal;
Let us scroll, through certain near-collapsing rags,
Paltry papers, stagnant mags,
Time, the Times, all digitized; to print farewell!
these companies' profits have gone to hell.
Google guides you through a tedious argument
Of questionable intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the box the search terms come and go
Ads and stolen content glow.

The many blogs that pitch their work upon the Internet,
The many sites that host the content on the Internet
Spoke their silence into the black of cyberspace,
Wrangled their words through wires,
Let appear response from countless mouths and fingers,
Slipped around firewalls, made a sudden leap
And seeing the conversations they had stirred,
Continue spilling text as readers sleep.

And indeed there will come time
For the yellowed forlorn sheets that slide along the street
Smudging ink, crumpling, folded, torn;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a democracy where news is free;
There will be time for people to create
A new model, work of new brains and hands
That type and put their thoughts upon your screen:
Thoughts from you and thoughts from me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions, parenthetical revisions,
Before a new model we must meet.

In the box the search terms come and go
Our darkest thoughts, recorded, glow.

And indeed there will be Times
Editors wonder, "How'd I err?" and, "how'd I err?"
Time to look forward, instead of stare
At that dinosaur with disapproving glare.
[They will say: "How the revenue is growing thin!"]
Your mourning shroud, sackcloth strapped across your waste,
Do not despair; confront the problem you are faced-
[The will say: "But how the revenue is growing thin!"]
Do you dare
Disturb the blogosphere?
Internet allows the space
For decisions and revisions that in print could not appear.

For I have known them all already, known them all:-
Have known the evening paper, morning post
I have found the papers I like reading most.
I've heard the voices dying, heard them all
Beneath the print and paper's thin ghost.
So how should I presume?

And I cannot know them all together, not at all,
Two eyes that scan and interpret a phrase,
With so much information spread out on a page;
They pin the beautiful creature to the wall,
Then continue to engage
The text in so many different varied ways.
And how should I presume?

And I have seen the pens already, seen them fall-
Pens gripped by citizens on the trail
[But off the bus, what precious new details!]
But should they then confess
When for quotes they transgress?
Quotes that lie or are dishonest, quotes at all,
So who might I then trust?
And how do I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have surfed at midnight through the nets,
And watched debates flow through those tubes,
Those lonely men and women, running Windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged hands
Scuttling across the desk on clicking keys.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, pass so peacefully!
All those clacking fingers,
Do they sleep ... tire ... does dread malinger
Stretching their brains, mad for you and me?
Should I, after writing countless words in essays
Have the strength to examine what the Huffington Post displays?
But though I have wept and groaned, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my words [grown slightly limp] on the web's uncaring platter
I am no prophet - and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And seen my blog stare back at me and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the words, the essays I have spat
Into the blogosphere, among some talk of this or that,
Would it have been all worth while,
To have bitten off perspective with a smile,
To have squeezed the day's news into a ball
To ask myself and you some overwhelming question,
To say, "I am legion, for we are many,
Come to inform you all, I shall tell you all"-
If one, reading this blog post or any,
Should say: "I do not understand at all.
Understand it not at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the paper Times, the magazines, Gutenberg's dream,
After the novels, and all paper, after wearing suits to go to work-
And this, and so much more?-
It is impossible to say just where we'll be!
But as if a magic lantern threw our fears in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If the one paper left per city were to fall,
And turning to its readers say:
"We're sorry, that is all,
No more content, that is all."
. . . . .
No! These are not weak structures, nor were meant to be;
Are the fourth estate, one that will try
To swell a progress, keep a wary eye
On government; and not become a tool,
Independent, glad to be of use,
Truthful, relevant, and meticulous;
Full of pride and pity, ready to expose abuse;
All times, indeed, pushing progress-
Almost never the Fool.

They grow old ... They grow old ...
Their pants wear thin, and cyberspace is cold.

Shall they part with paperdom? Or practice what they preach?
For there are others out there who can analyze a speech.
I have heard the papers calling, each to each.

I think that they might search for me.

I have seen them riding westward on the plains
Combing through financial sheets of black gone red
When a cold wind chills and transfixes icy dread.

They have lingered while technology has changed
We hope they might find some way around:
That what human voice still lingers, will not drown.

Re: The LA Times Finds Out Product Placement Isn't the Magic Bullet?

2009-04-10T21:55:00.002-04:00

Comment on Phil Bronstein's HuffPo post: "The LA Times Finds Out Product Placement Isn't the Magic Bullet?"

Remember on February 17, 2009 when Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz posted "Staying Real in an Instant," an advertorial about introducing instant coffee to Starbucks' lineup?

I do. It was above the fold, first article in the left-hand column. Right where this one, a legitimate news story, is. Perhaps Starbucks didn't pay for the ad, but there were more legitimate items to put there.

Newspapers aren't the only ones who sell out.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Ethical Blogging

2009-04-10T09:24:00.006-04:00

Bittergate journalist Mayhill Fowler made big news last June, reporting the angry comments Bill Clinton made toward Vanity Fair editor Todd Purdham. There were just a couple problems: she did not identify herself as a reporter and the tirade came after she called the piece a "hatchet job." As an Off The Bus citizen journalist, was what she did ethical?

For citizen journalists, there is no code of ethics, so journalists must act as they see fit. If you're Matt Drudge, this means there is minimal fact-checking, honesty and balance. Not so much of a problem if you know Drudge leans right, but still it would be nice to know he is following some code he makes available to people reading his work (this goes for all bloggers who do original reporting).

The Society of Professional Journalists has its own code that news organizations and their reporters are supposed to follow. Everyone knows this does not always happen. So I'll take this from a different approach, assuming all reporting is biased in some way, if not in the content of the writing, then in the overall message of the organization. Good reporting, even if it has a point of view, is not propaganda, but represents many sides of the issue.

CyberJournalist.net offers its own blogging code of ethics based on the Society of Professional Journalists' code. It changes "Seek Truth and Report It" to "Be Honest and Fair" and leaves out the SPJ's "Act Independently."

While I like the code, I disagree somewhat with the code in that bloggers should seek the truth in every article analyzed and every piece of information received from readers. Being honest and fair is not quite enough. Truth should still play a large role in blogging, even advocacy blogging.

I especially like that the code drops "Act Independently" because of all the great reporting Off The Bus did. These "citizen journalists" were mostly Obama supporters and yet they held him accountable for his words and actions. I believe that truthful and meaningful reporting is possible even when a journalist is associated with an organization. How many journalists do not have a point of view on politics, abortion, war?

Some people seemed to miss the point, like this commenter:

Just another attemot to kill the concept of Blogging. Dont fuck around with individuality. If you are outta content or blogburnt take a break to avoid such worthless attempts at making Bloggers into a mindless herd of sheep.
What I write/rave/rant in my blog is my personal thot process and I'm no way gonna alter it cos some reader got offended and thinks differently.

A code of ethics does not attempt to control bloggers, but rather to ensure that their readers are receiving the information they think they are. What it really comes down to as a blogger is being honest and disclosing as much about your reporting as possible.

Maybe I should develop a code of ethics myself...

...But you already knew this.

2009-04-06T19:05:00.005-04:00

[Click for larger version on Penny-Arcade.com]

Insightful. The hat could really represent any job at a newspaper - journalist especially. The metaphor has particular poignancy today, as the New York Times Co. has threatened to shut down The Boston Globe. Journalists across the country are chained to newspapers and their parent companies and advertisers, waiting to sink in the global economic downturn. But according to the Wall Street Journal, they may be able to recover:

The [Boston Globe] ultimatum doesn't necessarily ensure that the 137-year-old daily will close. In recent months, other publishers have achieved significant cost savings by issuing similar threats to unprofitable dailies such as the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., and the San Francisco Chronicle.

But even if that does not destroy them, the Internet's glacial reign is nigh. Content distribution models are changing. But that's okay, because it's the dinosaurs that are going down (just a few will probably adapt and survive), and it's the choice of journalists as to whether they want to go down with them.

Blogging the Izzys

2009-04-01T16:35:00.003-04:00

Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman were honored at the inaugural Izzy Awards last night at the State Theater in Ithaca, N.Y.

Organized by the Park Center for Independent Media, the event recognized the two journalists for their "special achievement in independent media," following the legacy of legendary journalist I.F. Stone.

Check out the video introduction for Greenwald I made for the presentation:

Press Release

Greenwald
Greewald began by distinguishing himself from "establishment" journalists, calling himself an independent blogger. In his opinion, Goodman is "the living and breathing embodiment of what journalism should be." He is instead a blogger, and for him there is a distinction between these, establishment journalists and independent journalists. Establishment journalists crank out journalism, even when they are "blogging" for their establishment media organization. Bloggers react to establishment journalism. Independent journalists think in a way contrary to establishment journalists. To demonstrate what an establishment journalist is, Greenwald cited an article by Newsweek's Evan Thomas, in which he reveals:

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy...By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.

This is not the person you want reporting, because the big questions will never be asked [and compared to the questions on torture and war that could be asked, the linked example seems utterly inconsequential]. If the press's role is not exposing lies, what is it?

Greenwald also tackled establishment journalism's secretive nature. Even while railing for governemnt transparency, journalists have a tendancy hide behind corporate facades. This is why all too often establishment news is not "fair and balanced" and why NBC does not do stories on GE.

To be credible, Greenwald stated, a medium must:

Keep a distance from the political structure's influence
Steer clear of corporate influence.

But, ah, 2 is so difficult. I.F. Stone's Weekly was free of advertisements. Salon is not. So here's the low-down, if you're looking for it. Salon.com uses both banner advertising and page intro ads (which don't appear with a premium membership). Salon is partially owned by Adobe. According to Yahoo Finance, "Adobe Systems founder and Salon Chairman John Warnock holds about 40% of the company's total voting securities." Salon does not present this fact when posting wire-style tech news from the gigaOM network.

Sometimes advertising is needed. When it is used, so too must transparency. Journalists and blogger who do have advertisers must not cater to them. This was perhaps the strongest point of Greenwald's presentation. Independent journalism is not a type of journalism. Journalism should be independent by nature:

If it's not independent, it's not journalism.

Goodman
A Pacifica veteran, Goodman was more at home with the leftist/aging hippie crowd. Most of the names she mentioned garnered applause, even at the most inappropriate moments.

Example (paraphrased):
"That day, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee."
[applause]

They were clapping, of course, for her enthusiasm, but it seemed cheap and misplaced. To everything there is a season. These people were applauding themselves for remembering rather than for agreeing with Goodman's many well-made points.

"We need a media that presents the full spectrum of perspectives," said Goodman. The sources of these perspectives should be identifiable. Mainstream media can be useful if:

It is unbiased and asks the hard questions

-or-

It is biased and can be analyzed as such in order to take down a corporation, goverment/official or "news" organization [Greenwald's specialty]

Mainstream media and their parent companies too often silence the majority, said Goodman. There is a "silenced majority" that opposes war and torture, but the mainstream media does not give them a voice, which it should.

Goodman championed Net Neutrality and open airwaves, the channels through which independent media flow. A violation of freedom of the press, she noted, is a violation of your right to know:

Democracy is a messy thing. It's our job to capture it all.

And that is exactly what Goodman and Greenwald are doing. It is important we follow them and that others emerge who will act with the same bravery and tenacity they do.

When Pages Aren't Made of 1s and 0s

2009-04-01T10:09:00.002-04:00

This is a blog about independent media (mostly) and encyclopedias are media.

Christopher Dawson, anti-Microsoft blogger at ZDnet, recently published a post proclaiming, "Good riddance, Encarta!" Yes, Microsoft Encarta will be phased out this year. But is that necessarily a good thing?

While I love to see Microsoft (and any big corporation, for that matter) blasted, I can't help thinking that there can be benefits to the establishment media (more on this later today or tomorrow, in a post of the inaugural Izzy Awards). They can get some things right, and you can always look to see where their interests lie. Take a look at ZDnet itself. It reveals on the website that it's owned by CBS. Their bloggers disclose their affiliations. But just like Wikipedia, independent media can get things wrong or show bias.

Writes Dawson:

I’m not saying Encarta was a bad product. On the contrary, it did a fine job of making encyclopedic articles searchable and accessible on a computer. However, I’m thrilled to see it go because of what it represents. Kids will just go to Wikipedia or the first three hits on Google, now, right? While that remains too true, what it really represents is the absolute challenge to educators to teach kids real Web-based research skills.

Many people are lazy and will just go to Wikipedia and the first three hits on Google. But this isn't research. Wikipedia can be hacked. The first three hits on Google won't give you alternative viewpoints or extend your knowledge beyond the scope of what the Wikipedia article will tell you. You need to dig deeper and consult more sources. And what about books? If you want to compare perspectives on Martin Luther King, Jr., you have decades of research and original thought available at your local library.

(Exception to the "first three hits are the same" rule: The third hit for a Google search "Martin Luther King" is martinlutherking.org, a website run by the white supremacist group Stormfront. Check it out, and tell me if that's a source you want Little Johnny using for his paper.)

What is needed is the teaching of good research methods. For beginning research, a mainstream encyclopedia is as good a source as any. From there you dig in and analyze critically. I wouldn't expect Little Johnny to expose Microsoft cover-ups (indeed, the EU believes it doesn't even need a watchdog), but he should consult a variety of sources, some of which are infrequently cited among bloggers because they are accessed only through specialty retailers and libraries: books. There is still history in those, too.

The Good Kind of Investigation

2009-03-30T20:01:00.002-04:00

Good news for those "seasoned journalists" who have been laid off or forced into early retirement. [Goodness, that's such a cliched broadcast lead]

Ariana Huffington today announced The HuffingtonPost Investigative Fund. Both staff reporters and freelance writers will work on the project, which currently has a $1.75 million budget.

Writes Huffington,

This investigative initiative is being funded by The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and will be headed by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project, which will be folded into the Fund.

HuffPo will also be working with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and NYU's Jay Rosen. So McDonalds and GE aren't funding or participating. Good.

It's like ProPublica - for free! Huffington writes:

And, in the open source spirit of the Web, all of the content the Fund produces will be free for anyone to publish.

That's huge. Free content for news sources and the public. But will any big outlets pick up the stories? They might need to, if cash gets tight enough. Huffignton wrote of the decline of newspapers and their funding for investigative journalism:

For too long, whether it's coverage of the war in Iraq or the economic meltdown, we've had too many autopsies and not enough biopsies. The HuffFund is our attempt to change this.

I like the image. We are only learning about the financial crisis through the corpse of America's financial system (well, it's on life support, anyway). A biopsy to extract problems early on keeps us protected. Even better might be vivisection (playing Big Brother on Big Brother) to prevent problems before they occur. Of course, it can be hard to see the woods for all the trees. But the more independents we have checking vitals, the better.

Indy Media is Gorges

2009-03-26T10:34:00.006-04:00

Maybe it's just because it's on my radar, but there seem to be quite a few new independent publications cropping up on campus. I recently picked up three of them: Bully Pulpit, Cake, and Better Mag.

Better Mag is just a silly little quarter-page magazine with handmade drawings and scatological humor. They seem to have no funding, and the issue I picked up was hand numbered as 14 of 25. it's a nice read if you're waiting for class to start and have nothing better to do.

Cake is indy-rock sheik, featuring artist interviews, reviews and show dates all packaged into stapled-in-the-upper-left-corner magazine. It's low-budget classic Rolling Stone: no politics, no sports, no color. Cake is all black-and white except for the title, which is hand-colored with a unique design. They cover both the national and local music scenes. It's more indy than Explosions in the Sky at that first set they played for KVRX in Austin where they didn't have any fans or sell out yet, man.

Bully Pulpit is a serious newsletter out of Cornell, published with the support of Campus Progress (the college division of the Center for American Progress). It's been around since 2007 (Check out older issues here) and tackles both global and local issues. The tone ranges from journalistic to nearly frenzied with passion. Some pieces are a little heavy-handed, but overall it's a nice newsletter. Unlike Cake and Better Mag, I haven't seen this available many places on campus. Try the bottom floor of Friends hall by the stairwell if you're interested - I've had the best luck there.

Cold Hard Blogging

2009-03-24T13:50:00.000-04:00

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

And isn't it great that I'm able to do it at a minimal cost?

To publish today, all you need is a computer (I'm in a lab right now) and access to the Internet (using free Internet). No press, no ink, no paper. I don't even have to buy the newspapers I wish to read.

Wow. Is there any way to make money off of this? It turns out there is, but it takes more work than simply throwing up a blog with Google ads.

When conservative blogger Mark Finkelstein gave a presentation in class last week, I expected something about making money blogging - the subject of that day's readings. Imagine my disappointment to learn he operates at a loss. (...probably - he wasn't sure exactly). A landlord in Ithaca, Finkelstein has no intention of making FinkelBlog his primary source of income.

Finkelstein said he made a decent salary blogging with NewsBusters, which is promising if you don't mind working for someone else. If you're more the DIY type, there are four revenue models we have identified in class:

1. Direct from fans:
The Talking Points Memo option, in which your loyal readers give you cash. Of course, this means you need loyal readers. Kevin Kelly offers an interesting take on the issue, arguing one needs 1,000 True Fans to live comfortably:

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

Tap the audience, like Robert Greenwald did for "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers," asking for donations in exchange for listing supporters as producers in the credits. Or you could try Lawrence Watt-Evans' model:

In 2004 author Lawrence Watt-Evans used [the 1,000 True Fans] model to publish his newest novel. He asked his True Fans to collectively pay $100 per month. When he got $100 he posted the next chapter of the novel. The entire book was published online for his True Fans, and then later in paper for all his fans. He is now writing a second novel this way. He gets by on an estimated 200 True Fans because he also publishes in the traditional manner -- with advances from a publisher supported by thousands of Lesser Fans. Other authors who use fans to directly support their work are Diane Duane, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, and Don Sakers. Game designer Greg Stolze employed a similar True Fan model to launch two pre-financed games. Fifty of his True Fans contributed seed money for his development costs.

2. Advertisers:
The old stand-by. From Google Ads to product placement to banners. Google Ads are safer than traditional advertising because they are controlled by computers (really, really smart ones) that are not offended by your hatred of Coca-Cola. They are also more annoying because they can lead to white supremacist organizations and obnoxious dieting advise.

3. Donors:
This is sort of like direct from fans, if your fans include Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. The problem with donors is you might be beholden to their interests. With 1,000 True Fans, you can at least trust most of the people to stick with you, whereas if you criticize the new MacBook, Steve Jobs might be unwilling to pen your next paycheck.

4. Borrowing/Stealing:
Great way to rack up some debt, but the idea might pay off.

5. Marry/Have and Affair With a Wealthy Patron:
This is how Margaret Sanger raised capital for her Woman Rebel and Birth Control Review. In this case a donor was necessary, because very few companies would advertise in such publications.

But probably the two most important factors for making money are determination and luck. Publishing is easy, so the problem becomes getting your voice heard in the blogosphere. What separates you from the millions of other bloggers? Having a niche and an interesting take are ways to start. Also, don't underestimate the power of luck. Who would have ever thought I Can Has Cheezburger would go from a few viewers every Caturday to 200,000 unique visitors a day?