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Bullets
• Sienna Miller was just on The Daily Show, wearing leggings. Either she has an unspeakable obsession with tight black leg-clinging cloth, or her legs are horribly scarred and she’s embarrassed to either show them or leave them unsheathed.
• It snowed! I can’t believe Extreme Blizzard Winterfront 2007 is already over.
• The whole Boston Aqua Teen hoax falls neatly into the same category as the Ohio U scare over a This Bike is a Pipe Bomb sticker and the time an entire flight was diverted when someone found a note that said “bomb bomb bomb … meet the parents,” which was clearly a quote from the Ben Stiller movie.
Once again I’d like to reiterate the need for security forces to take at least basic pop-culture training. It’s for our safety!
Anyway, the press conference with the two arrested dudes is quite funny:
• I can’t believe Molly Ivins is dead. I actually had no idea she was as sick as she must have been. Her voice and her humor will be sorely missed.
• Which brings me to this shirt:
At this point I’ll have to break with many of my ‘net pals and say that I don’t care for this shirt. My main beef (there are a couple) is this: Breast cancer is not about tits. It’s about the person those tits happen to be attached to. The boobs are completely expendable if it means saving a life. And this shirt so flippantly makes it sound as if the main concern when fighting breast cancer is the breast.
Not so, friends, not so.
But this type of borderline outrageous advertising is something we’ve come to expect from the Komen Foundation, which has ostensibly done more for branding Breast Cancer ™ than it has to find a cure. [For further reading on the Komenification of Breast Cancer ™, please see what Twisty, an actual breast cancer survivor, has to say.) Their intent is pure, I’m sure (as in, “do whatever it takes to raise money”), but their marketing team needs a swift knock upside the head. Because not only do they produce the occasional boob-centric T-shirt, they also dispense with absolute nonsense such as this, which seems to me to be clearly inappropriate and misguided.
I’m all for drawing attention to an unsexy story — cancer and donating money to find its cure — but I resent that breast cancer has to revolve around tits and femininity.
• I’m in the market for a house. Sort of (within the next three years or so). So I drove around a particular Midtown neighborhood I’m not that familiar with today, looking to see what the offerings were. Buying a house seems like an incredibly daunting task, wrought with all sorts of stress about shit I’ve never had to deal with before, including people in suits and copper wiring and neighborhood associations. But sometimes I think about how it must feel to stomp around in your own house, singing at the top of your lungs, at any hour of the day, and it makes me burn with envy.
• I’ve been working off and on on a reprint of the massive Mississippi River series the CA published between Christmas and New Year’s. We’re basically taking all the stories and adding some more photos and printing a 36-page broadsheet book (on high-bright paper!) of the entire thing. I think it’s going to be really, really cool. It goes on sale around Feb. 14 (I’m not sure about the exact date, but it prints on the 14th) for $5, and — seriously, I’m not shilling for my company here; I’m telling you like it is, from looking at the copy and art every day — it’s going to be absolutely worth it. They’re only printing 1,000 copies, so if you want one for yourself, I’m told they’ll be in the lobby of the CA for sale. The photography alone on this project is outstanding. I can’t rave about our photo staff enough. They are the best in the region, no question about it.
• That Biden guy? Total douche. Okay, maybe not a douche, but I don’t feel bad for him or feel like he was unfairly misunderstood. I heard Dan Savage on NPR tonight debating some other guy about Biden’s “slip-up,” and I, like Savage, am content in knowing that this ends Biden’s presidential aspirations. Seriously, my next president would never even let such a thought form in his head, much less trickle out his mouth. And by “his”, I mean “his or her,” because it sure as fuck might be a “his or her” kind of year.
• This month’s Smithsonian has an article in it about facial reconstruction artists during WWI, accompanied by some fabulous photographs of soldiers before and after their masks had been applied. As a fan of both the macabre and of functional art, the whole idea appeals to me on a visceral level, but I especially love that Art helped lessen the impact the bodily destruction wreaked by war had on the everday lives of surviving, but maimed, soldiers. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking story, but one that is fascinating.
• I’m out of wine, so I guess I’ll go play some Sim City 4 and then go to bed. YAWN.
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Day 30 — Stairway to Asphalt
This is the door from the laundry room to the parking lot. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve run up these stairs because I was convinced a zombie face was going to peek out from between the stairs and nibble on my ankle. Which is why I try to do my laundry during the day and not at night.
Lesson learned.
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I just had dinner — herb chicken bake! — with Phil and Jamieslan, and Jamie showed us this video and I haven’t stopped laughing. It’s of some WoW team leader taking a bunch of people to battle against a dragon.
High on nerd comedy and profanity, so NSFW.
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Day 29 — Idlewild
Idlewild Presbyterian on Union, taken via time travel in 1959.
Just kidding. It’s a Photoshop job.
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Buy this album
The grooves in your brain will thank you.
Last night while digging through a box of computer CDs, looking for my Sim City 4 disc, I stumbled upon an iTunes gift card someone gave me last year for Christmas that I thought I’d lost. And lo I embarked upon a quest to enrich my hard drive with tunes so sweet and poppy and complex that I could not be helped but to decide upon Rob Crow’s brand new solo album. And, while the songs are pretty short, it won’t matter because you’ll just put it on a constant loop anyway.
Get a free taste here.
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Because he posts stuff like this and then doesn’t have comments enabled so people can actually interact with him.
His main beef in the post is with The Commercial Appeal for not publishing news of a wrestler’s death until nearly ten days after he died. Because he doesn’t link to the CA article, I can’t look at it and tell you if it’s a follow-up story or a first-day obituary. There’s a big difference. And, since I can’t seem to find the story on the CA’s website, it’s possible that there’s no link because it’s not online (which is annoying for its own reasons).
He muses, in a post titled “An example of the Commercial Appeal’s timely reporting”:
This is what passes for “journalism” in 2007. No wonder the bloggers are running the newspapers out of business.
Since I can’t comment over at Paul’s, I’ll just say it here. Sad as it is to admit, there are lots of reasons why newspapers are struggling these days. Corporate ownership and shareholder bean-counting ranks near the top, from what I can tell. (The inflation of middle management and general industry-wide misunderstanding of the opportunities offered by the internet are up there as well.) Bloggers don’t even rate near the top. I’ll get to that in a minute.
First, I have to point out, in standard bloggers-vs.-newspapers webshits fashion, the irony of a blogger who relies on the city’s daily for the background info in much of his blog’s content claiming that bloggers are the reason newspapers are going “out of business.”
(Unless he is being entirely facetious, which is possible, but I don’t really ever see Downtown Paul employ facetious or sarcastic humor, except in that post’s title, so I don’t think so. Also, if he means it in the sense that bloggers and their readers are linking to newspapers’ web stories instead of buying the paper, thus decreasing the amount of money funnelling into the newsroom, then that’s possible, I guess.)
There’s further irony in there since Paul doesn’t let people comment on his blog. Willful obstruction of interactivity is the domain of the big, monolithic paper, no? It’s certainly not the local blogger’s domain (pun planned out in advance and notorized by my Pun Notary), is it?
It’s fair to say that the way people seek out and digest news content is shifting along with the popularity of blogs. Welcome to the new web. I’m sure there are lots of people out there who just visit random blogs for their news, but at some point, the news content generated and shared usually comes back to a news organization — a dreaded MSM-bot — with the resources to investigate and disseminate news in the first place. Blogs further disseminate the news to readers who would rather log on and read like-minded quacks’ opinions about stuff than pick up a paper and read the news without interwoven commentary.
But bloggers, by and large, are recreational and their craft is practiced when it’s convenient. They provide the colorful commentary to go along with the day’s events. Until there are paid, investigative bloggers who do nothing but roam around with laptops and a press pass and the cell phone numbers of the mayor and his/her cabinet, bloggers aren’t going to pose a big threat to the newsgathering structure utilized by papers.
Some day, that blogger-as-primary-investigator structure may actually emerge. And if it’s good for the community, then I’m all for it. Hell, if I ever get a laptop, maybe I’ll help usher that age into being. I’m not trying to protect newspapers; I want to protect the integrity of the professional newsgathering process.
So, bloggers who rejoice when newsrooms lay off people and when papers’ stocks fall and fall, try to deflate your melon heads just a bit and recognize that, until you get your shit together and start up independent investigation teams that can fill the void created by the downsizing of newsrooms and the removal of reporters from the streets and conference rooms of your city, your community will suffer.
[Sorta got off on a blogger/newspaper tangent there, and now I'm not sure how to segue back into the whole death-of-a-wrestler thing, which, if truly reported ten days late in the CA, constitutes a mistake by someone. Which sometimes happens, as we have not upgraded the wire desk to fully automatic copybots just yet. May Bam Bam Bigelow's family and fans forgive the CA's tardy reporting.]
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